Strategy begins at home
As a young Marketing Director at United Distillers, now Diageo, I lived with the fact that every new advertising campaign we worked on had to pass a quantitative Impact and Communication test. Advertising Agency Executives tended not to like the test; they felt that creative ideas could be crushed by its blunt appraisal. Nonetheless I learned that a good Ad had to a) stand out and b) communicate the idea you wanted to plant in people’s heads. Not an unreasonable idea if investing in creating a new advertising campaign. Quite often in those tests, a campaign passed the former but failed the latter.
The effectiveness of the communications check required that you had to be very clear on what it was you intended to communicate. Often, marketing managers were not so good at summing this up concisely in their briefs and agencies were not unhappy because that meant they could press on with their own creative ideas. This often did not lead to the best results. The key learning was that advertising effectiveness is defined, to a very large extent, by the quality of the brief which requires a very clear understanding of your target customers’ needs and your brand’s ability to meet them. We became very good at this.
Some years later, around the time that I was opening the doors at forward thinking inc in 1998, I was reading “Brand You”, a slim volume by Tom Peters, I recommend it if you haven’t read it. Ahead of his time, Tom argued that in an increasingly volatile world of work where long, one-firm careers would become a thing of the past, a person was wise to consider themselves a brand. A brand which was clearly differentiated in its field and valuable to buyers, in this case – employers, partners, investors, even book buyers or TV or podcast producers. I’m not sure that podcasts had been invented in 1998, I may have made that bit up.
It made great sense to me at the time. A person existing as a brand sounds a bit odd but in truth, people are constantly being considered and appraised much as brands are, so it pays to be a strong brand and that requires a good appraisal of your differentiating strengths and a brief to yourself to keep polishing them and communicating them effectively to interested parties.
In my own 2021 book, On Strategy I argued that businesses strategy and a person’s own strategy for their lives were very similar in their intellectual construct. To develop an effective strategy for either you must be clear about what you want to achieve over time and very clear on your differentiating proposition. You leverage the proposition to achieve the vision for your business or your life.
As a person it will pay to be a brand which stands out but even more important to be different in an appealing way to your target market. You might consider developing a strategy for yourself. This process will start with a self-appraisal in which analysis is helpful to be as honest as you can be. Carefully consider those aspects of intellect, experience, personality, perspective, and skills which help make you unique and might make you an attractive proposition to others. Worry less about your weaknesses, though you may try to address them.
Be clear on the vision you have for your life, (this is not easy) and develop a plan for yourself which leverages your unique assets to help you achieve it. Then you can enjoy spending most of your career excelling in what you are very good at, leading the life you aspire to on your own terms. This is the key I think to having a happy and successful life.
The New Year is a good time for reflection and self-appraisal. Perhaps consider spending an hour during the holidays once the festivities are over to think about yourself and your life plans. Plot the development of your own lifestyle brand , because strategy begins at home.