Barriers

I used to make a lot of mistakes when it came to strategic planning. Well, actually, I used to not even know how to plan. Or what the heck a strategy was. So there was that. But once someone helped me figure that out, I still used to do a lot of little things wrong that kept me from producing the best result for my clients.

I’ve made some progress with planning since then. Still have a ton of room to grow, but I definitely look at things differently than I used to. And it seems like it happened in stages.

First there was the “Tactic vomiting” stage. You can always tell someone is in this stage when you start up a brainstorm and the first thing you hear them say is “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” Because here’s the problem — nothing is cool if it doesn’t move the needle for your client. And while you might luck into such needle moving from time to time, just throwing out tactics, or “big ideas” as some like to call them, without any baseline or strategy is an approach that’s destined for failure or disappointment.

Next there was the “Research is always right” stage. This is a much better approach than tactic vomiting, because at least you’re focusing on data. And your decisions are based on something real versus just the fact that something sounds kind of cool, like the world’s biggest chocolate bar. Research can get us a lot closer to helping the business, but the issue is that research isn’t always as targeted to our clients customers as we would like. Still, there is a lot to like in this approach and we don’t spend enough time looking at the numbers as we should. At least I know I don’t.

But lately, I’ve become a huge fan of a third stage — “What barriers are in your customers’ way?” Because if you think about it, barriers are what we’re really trying to eliminate in order to increase brand trial and relevance. Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? But how often do you ask a client what the barriers are that keep their target audiences from using their product(s)? Too often we jump in and try to solve the problem without really finding out what the problem, or barrier, is from the customers’ POV.

Here’s an example. I remember a scenario where we were developing a yearly strategic plan for a client. We had an idea of how this company wanted to position itself and what story we’d worked with them to tell in the past. So it would have been really easy to just get in a room and start developing tactics supporting those preconceived notions. And actually, we did just that.

But luckily, we had some people who hadn’t worked on the business before participate in the brainstorm. As we began working to get them up to speed on where this client had been and wanted to go, they started asking questions about barriers. And it changed the entire direction of our planning.

Instead of focusing on “big ideas,” we started talking about the customer experience. What did the customers who were fans of the brand like so much about it? And what were the barriers that kept other potential customers away and going back to competitors?

To make a long story short, we uncovered that our client wasn’t including some of the experiences its fans liked most in the brand story we were telling. So our strategy going forward became to bring those experiences to life. And once we figured out the barrier we needed to eliminate, developing supporting tactics to eliminate it was the easy part.

See, that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned from recent strategic planning experiences. We can come up with “wouldn’t it be cool” tactics all day long. But if they aren’t supporting an overarching strategy to get rid of barriers for our clients, they really aren’t as cool as we think they are.

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