♟️ Marketing Strategy without Bullsh*t
Most marketing strategies fail because they play no role in everyday life. They sound clever, look good and change nothing. Here, I show you my approach to strategies that actually work.
Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter. Thank you so much for reading this 💚
For 18 years now (wow, I feel old writing that), I have been working on marketing strategies and have had the privilege of designing concepts and workshops for some of the world’s biggest brands.
From McDonald’s, the world’s largest burger joint, to the NGO Greenpeace, the car brand Opel, the food retail chain SPAR and many more, before joining the start-up Too Good To Go as Head of Marketing.
Now I have been an entrepreneur with my own marketing studio FutureStrategies for four years. And while running my practise, I have noticed one aspect that is not handled properly in most companies or even by agencies.
➡️ Most marketing strategies fail because they play no role in everyday life.
Everyone has an image of “strategies” in their mind.
A definition. Perhaps even a course of action.
But most of the approaches I see in practice are
a) complex
b) intellectual
c) fluffy – in other words, shallow
That’s why many strategies get stuck in presentation mode. They never make it to implementation. They are not really put into practice. They sound good, but are not practically useable.
Complexity is often just ambiguity in disguise.
So today I would like to share my strategic approach as a model. It consists of a mix of other models such as:
The Strategic Kernel
The Limbic Map
The Future-Back Approach
The Brand Archetypes
✴️ The Strategic Flow
One model. A hundred names.
When I develop marketing strategies or design workshops, I use this model because it is simple, tangible and practical.
I am a big fan of Richard Rumelt’s strategic approach, which he calls “the Kernel”. For my own modified model, I work with three steps:
Diagnosis
Guidelines
Actions
These three are complemented by two further aspects to really bring them to life:
Skills
Resources
1️⃣ Diagnosis
Strategy without diagnosis is wishful thinking with KPIs.
Most mistakes – whether made by large corporations, policymakers or start-/scale-ups – happen because people start by defining goals or actions. But the task of a strategy – and therefore of a strategist – is to start with the problem.
Or as Albert Einstein said:
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.”
At the Oracle of Delphi, the place where the ancient Greeks came to seek guidance about their future, it was written in large letters: Gnothi seauton. Know thyself!
Not as a question. But as a basic prerequisite.
First, we need to know who we are, who our target audience is, what problems we want to solve, and what shapes our market.
“Strategy does not start with what shareholders want, or what ‘core capabilities’ we have. It starts with a profound appreciation of and fascination with customers, and a deep desire to make their lives/businesses better off.”
Roger Martin
I work on this diagnosis in my projects across five levels:
a) Human Needs
First, we need to understand what drives our target audience. In “Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy”, Phil Barden describes three basic needs: excitement, autonomy and security, or the pursuit or avoidance of these.
