Most strategy documents we are handed run to forty pages. Most of the brands behind them can’t be described by their own staff.
The test
Ask five people in the company what makes it different. If you get five answers, you don’t have a strategy yet. You have a list.
What a good sentence does
- It names who it is for
- It says what they get that they can’t get elsewhere
- It is true today, not in three years
Everything else, from the logo to the home page headline, is that sentence said again in a different material.
How we get there
Two days with the team, a week with customers, and a wall of everything anyone says twice. The sentence is usually already on the wall. Our job is to notice it.