NotitiesNo Bullsh*t Strategy
Alex MH Smith
Het boek "No Bullsh*t Strategy" benadrukt het belang van een duidelijke en effectieve strategie die echte actie uitlokt, in plaats van vage en betekenisloze formuleringen. Het pleit voor het creëren van unieke waarde die consumenten niet elders kunnen vinden en het belang van het begrijpen van de markt en je eigen bedrijf. Daarnaast wordt de rol van creativiteit en het belang van een heldere communicatie van strategieën besproken.
Wat strategie is (en niet is)
Most strategy is, let's face it, bullshit. And I mean that in the most technical sense. Bullshit can be best described as a bunch of fancy words that ultimately mean nothing.
BS Strategy 1: Goals as strategy
BS Strategy 2: Generic strategies
BS Strategy 3: Fluffy meaningless confusing waffly unactionable strategies
The whole point of a strategy is that it sends you on a different path from anyone else. A strategy's effectiveness in provoking action is more important than it being "right".
De definitie
The unique value a business provides to the market.
That's it. A business is nothing more than a system designed to deliver value and receive value in return. The more value it gives, the more it gets.
Value begrijpen
The main way people screw this up is by confusing the value they provide with the product or service they make. Value is the benefit that your consumer gets from your product. The thing they get from it which they "value" enough to choose it.
Your company is not your product; it's the value it delivers.
By having value-focused strategies, the greatest brands are often able to follow a single unchanging strategy indefinitely, simply by occasionally changing the way they deliver it at a product level. Nike, Red Bull, Harley Davidson – pretty much none of them have changed their strategies in 40 years.
Unique begrijpen
Unique value is: Value that your customer cannot get from anywhere else.
When you add to that the fact that "better" is typically subjective and hard to prove, you come to realise that it is ultimately a synonym for "the same" – because you're talking about occupying the same market position.
Only is better than best.
The art ultimately is to come up with a value offering that is not only unique, but also desired/needed by a hell of a lot of people. You can't get it simply by asking people what they want. You can only get it from lateral creative thinking.
De strategische hiërarchie
What you deliver. How you deliver it. How you communicate it. That's all a business need ever be.
- Offer compelling value to your customers
- Which lots of them want
- Which they can't get anywhere else
- Which your products deliver effectively
- And which your brand communicates memorably
That's strategic mastery.
Competitie vermijden
Great strategies do not produce companies that are "more competitive" or "better" than their competitors. Great strategies produce companies which have no direct competitors at all.
The perils of clustering are obvious: because all the businesses in the market are offering the same sort of value, the only way they can gain advantage is to cut costs and increase spend – hammering their profit margin.
Declustering means allowing your competitors to continue fighting over their favoured market space while you go and offer something new.
Twee strategische routes
Unexpected value
Delivering unexpected value involves stepping outside of category assumptions and imagining what else this category could possibly be about.
Method noticed that cleaning products were universally sold in ugly, brash packaging. They thought, "What if we put cleaning products in beautiful packaging too?" It gave them massive standout and accentuated their environmental credentials.
Airbnb discovered their value by observing what was already working: the feeling of authenticity and connection for modern travellers who didn't want to be seen as old-fashioned tourists. They asked:
- What are we doing that's both unexpected and working?
- How can we capture that?
- How can we double down on it?
Contrarian value
Here we aren't saying "look at this new thing I'm offering". Instead we're saying: "Everyone in this category thinks X, but we think Y."
Contrarian value demands that you actually stop offering something the category normally values, so you can unlock new value that's incompatible with it.
This is the best form of strategy. It creates unique and defensible positions, punchy brands with energy. It's almost impossible for competitors to copy – they would have to undermine their own offerings.
Two requirements:
- Willingly sacrifice market share. Be able to say: "A lot of consumers are looking for X, and we simply don't do that."
- Actively cultivate weaknesses. In order to effectively offer one thing, you have to be bad at offering another.
Nokia's failure: They dominated robust, cheap, everyman phones. When iPhone emerged, the smart thing would have been to double down – become even more tough and accessible. Instead they tried to copy Apple, and failed.
So recognise that our job here is not to "create" a strategy, but rather to find a strategy that is already latent in our business as it is today.
Self-loathing brands don't like what they are. One big brand I worked with had huge profitability and a market space they totally owned. But management got bored and tried to transition into something "more groovy." Millions of pounds later, they'd achieved nothing other than confusing their core consumers.
There is no such thing as a "desirable" or "undesirable" market position. What makes something exciting is how you execute it. Dull brands are those which are timid in execution and try to spread themselves too thinly.
The "secret" to my consultancy work is simply to first internalise these principles, and then just chat to people who know a thing or two about the topic. That's how 75%+ of strategies are born.
Why chats work:
- Chats are opinion-based – opinions are concerned with the space between facts
- Chats are candid – off-record removes political pressures
- Chats pressure people to perform – no hiding when there are only two of you
- Chats have room to breathe – tangents and surprise are the essence of strategy
You can never "research your way to a strategy"; the point will always come where you have to take a step back and look at the whole picture – a job which only human intuition can accomplish.
Remove subjective language
You must remove all subjective language from your strategy and see what's left.
The opposites game
Would the opposite of this strategy also make logical sense?
If yes, you've probably got a good strategy. If a law firm's strategy is "winning the most cases" – as opposed to what? All competitors trying to lose? That fails. Only strategies which your competitors might choose not to do are legitimate.
The how cascade
To any strategic statement, ask: How? Keep asking until your answer has the quality of a solution, rather than an aspiration.
- We want to double our revenue by 2030
- OK, how?
- By becoming the number-one dog food for pensioners
- OK, how?
- By tailoring our offering to lap dogs, which they disproportionately own
- Ah, OK, got it
That "got it" feeling is what a fully baked strategy should provoke.
First goal of strategy: Making you different from yourself. If you don't change anything, you can't expect your situation to change.
You're not whipping out a diagram. Any strategy that needs a drawing has serious problems. You're not spitting jargon. You just explain it – as a single page of A4, with paragraphs of argument culminating in the punchline.
This is a job for Word, not PowerPoint. PowerPoint is designed as a presentation aid. Word produces documents that stand on their own feet.
Why prose works:
- Presents strategy as an argument
- Encourages people to internalise and repeat in their own words (no memorisation)
- Exposes bad thinking – no hiding behind slides
Structure:
- Background
- Strategy argument
- Strategy summary ("Therefore our strategy is...")
- Delivery (key actions)
A strategy is only as good as it is useful. The action is everything. Only maybe 40% of brands do a "decent" job of executing.
Minimum viable strategy
What is the bare minimum you need to do in order to be genuinely following this strategy?
Another way: What is the minimum we need to do for consumers to understand our value offering without us telling them what it is?
The sweet spot:
- Business A: 100% generic (no leverage)
- Business B: 90% generic, 10% different (just right)
- Business C: 30% generic, 70% different (too unusual)
Creative canvas
Great strategic brands expand their creative canvas to incorporate their entire business. They take imaginative thinking that most brands limit to advertising, and apply it everywhere.
If you create a business which is anecdote-worthy, "talkable", then the business essentially becomes its own walking ad.
One big misconception: you need to constantly re-do strategy as circumstances change. Your goal is to hold the same position indefinitely.
But if the market moves and you stand still, your strategy changes without you knowing it. You must constantly be re-executing to fulfil your strategy in the latest context.
Multi-layer pacing
The pace of change differs by layer:
- Macro strategy – basically never changes
- Brand – changes very gradually
- Product – must always deliver value, changes as needed
- Operations – always in flux
- Marketing campaigns – change frequently, overall message stays static
This consistency builds brand reputation and gives you an unshakable stranglehold over your market position.
What the customer wants is a clear, navigable market, with powerful brands holding position for decades. So give it to them.
A crucial ingredient of any strategic value offering is a deep respect for the consumer – for their time, for their priorities, and even for their biases. What you think they "should" care about is nothing. What they do, in fact, care about is everything.
Don't try and fight the status quo with the status quo. Don't play the game of saying "my competitors claim to be ethical but we're ACTUALLY ethical." That's a "better" strategy. You need to change the conversation.
