Good Strategy (versus bad strategy)

A few months ago, I was at a client brand strategy session with my co-presenter down south. We were hired to develop a new brandmark for their entertainment brand, and there were two distinct groups of stakeholders involved in the joint venture. My first inclination was to agree with everything the client demanded from session timing to pre-meetings (once the budget was set), however I had just had a bad experience where we didn’t have stakeholder approval leading up to the session, so I decided to stand my ground.

The conversation began like this:

Me: “John, can you walk me through the final stakeholder teams and who, among both groups, will NOT be present at a strategy session”?

Pause.

Already the client was becoming more amenable when I began to push the issue that our strategy session was really about building consensus and it would be hard to sell the concept up the latter if buy-in wasn’t 100% from the start.

Client: “Well, we could possibly get David there. He’s on our side. On our counter part’s side, I don’t think we can get Michael. Maybe we can get Joe”.

My client went back to the teams, and we eventually got enough folks in a room (around 8 total) representing both firms to ensure agreement on the over arching strategy for this new joint brand.

The good strategy here is to approach your client when intuition or experience tells you that it might be set up to fail. Chances are, your client will respond to your strategic counseling. The bad strategy? As I mentioned, we had just finished a client session where we didn’t have ‘access’ to leadership, and in the end, our direct clients were happy, but their “bosses” didn’t understand our approach and ultimately never signed off on the creative direction.

All in all, this branding session couldn’t have gone better. My colleague and I were told it was the best thing they’ve experienced – highly imaginative and creative. And it looks like they’ve decided on a final direction for both entertainment entities.

Now all we need is more of that positive juice to throw on our boss!