Strategy is deciding who you are for and what you are not going to do. Ben Norman breaks down the 3Cs, the McCafe campaign, and why most teams skip straight to tactics.
Most marketers can’t define strategy. I include myself in that. Ask even senior people what strategy actually is and they go quiet, then start describing a campaign, which is not the same thing.
So I sat down with Ben Norman, strategy director at Principles and host of the Marketing Room 101 podcast, to get a clean answer. He is engaged to one of our team and once came in to train us on exactly this, so I knew he could cut through it. Here is what stuck with me.
What is marketing strategy, in plain English?
Strategy is the bridge between a person who might buy and the product you want to sell them. Everything in the middle is noise, and your job is to see through it.
Ben’s picture is simple. On one side, a potential buyer. On the other, your product. In between sit hundreds of people with opinions: the board, the retailer, three agencies, the sales team. Strategy is listening to all of that and still bringing the buyer and the product together in a way that is a fair exchange.
The word itself comes from the ancient Greek tacticos, the people who commanded the battlefield. Generals needed two roles: the people deciding the broad approach, and the people deciding the moves on the day. Marketing borrowed both, then forgot the first one.
Why do so many teams skip strategy and jump to tactics?
Because tactics feel like progress. Strategy is the harder, slower work of choosing what not to do, so people avoid it.
Ben quoted the line that strategy is the art of choosing what not to do, and what is left is what you do. He pointed to Apple. When Steve Jobs came back, the company was a mess and the objective was survival. The strategy was, near enough, simplify. Three words on a screen. It sounds easy until you try to get there.
“There is no one single truth, because a lot of the time you’ve got people jumping into tactics.” Ben Norman
The trap is that tactics are visible and reassuring. You can point at a TikTok or a billboard. You can’t point at a decision to ignore a whole audience, even though that decision is usually the one doing the heavy lifting.
What framework actually helps you build a strategy?
The 3Cs: customer, company, competition. Ben has never found a problem the 3Cs can’t crack.
The model comes from the Japanese strategist Kenichi Ohmae. Who is the customer, and who have you decided not to chase? What does your company genuinely do against that need? And how is that different from everyone else, because if you are doing the same thing as your rivals, you are interchangeable and you are not creating value.
One tweak of his I loved: think in alternatives, not competitors. The competitor to a Snickers looks like a KitKat. But the real alternative might be a protein shake, or an apple, or just not snacking at all. That widens the question and changes the answer.
What does good strategy look like in the wild?
McDonald’s McCafe is Ben’s favourite. They found a universal truth, picked a fight, and the strategy reads clearly straight off the screen.
McDonald’s wanted people to take their coffee seriously. The customer insight was that people want decent coffee but are tired of coffee nonsense, the test tubes and the dry cappuccinos. The company had a real claim, the same Arabica beans as the big chains, at a fraction of the faff and the price. The competition sat above and below them.
So they built a campaign that took the mickey out of coffee snobbery and positioned McCafe as the antidote. Ben calls it a ‘versus’ rather than an ‘about’ position, the same move Brewdog made. You can dissect the whole strategy just by watching the ad, which is the sign it was done properly.
How do you do the groundwork without burning the budget?
Stop talking and start listening. Interview everyone one to one, get lost in the brand for a couple of days, then go and watch real customers.
Ben’s process starts with one-to-one chats, never a workshop, because people are honest when the boss isn’t in the room. Then he talks to what he calls the customer connectors, the call centre and the sales team who hear the truth every day. Then he goes out and watches people shop, which has got him removed from more than one B&Q while studying the paint fixture for a client.
“Speak to people until you start hearing the same thing, until you start feeling like you’re not really learning anything more.” Ben Norman
That is the signal to stop. Diminishing returns on the conversations means you know enough. Then you distil it down, like a bow tie, from a pile of information to a single sentence, maybe a single word, before opening it back out into a thousand tactical ideas.
The bits worth stealing
If you want the shortcuts from the episode, here they are:
- Define who you are not for, not just who you are for
- Run everything through the 3Cs: customer, company, competition
- Think in alternatives, not just direct competitors
- Distil to one sentence before you touch tactics
- Interview people one to one, never in a workshop
- Talk to the call centre and sales team, not just the CMO
- Go and watch real people choose in the real world
- Offer a client a couple of routes, not one take-it-or-leave-it answer
Listen to the full episode
Watch it on YouTube or listen via embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk. Ben hosts the Marketing Room 101 podcast, and Paul Feldwick’s book Why Does The Pedlar Sing?, which Ben rates, is worth a read on why advertising should entertain.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my co-owner Will, where senior marketers share the screw-ups that taught them the most. It is part marketing lesson, part group therapy.
We spent an hour pulling apart strategy and tactics and ended up admitting we still weren’t sure which one the menu in a restaurant counts as. If two podcast hosts can’t agree, maybe go easy on yourself at the next planning offsite.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
