Doing work that never sees the light of day
Brand strategy in public and in private
Some bits of brand strategy work are allowed out in public. Vision and mission statements I’ve written appear on various client websites, next to the values that I defined for them. Sometimes a client takes my messaging work and uses it verbatim as customer-facing copy.
Even when my strategy work is for internal eyes only, I usually turn it into a brief for visual identity work or advertising or such like. Something happens in public.
That’s mostly how it goes down.
Lately, however, I’ve been doing the kind of work that’s only ever discussed behind closed doors.
You took the words right out of my deck
I was in a meeting the other day, in which a client CEO was speaking my language. As in they were literally speaking my language. They were saying things that I’d given them to say, almost verbatim.
I’d done some work on storytelling for the holding company of a privately held group. To bring the ideas to life, I wrote a short script, imagining what the CEO might say if they were pitching to potential investors or acquisitions.
I put words in the CEO’s mouth as a presentation technique. And now those same words were coming out of the CEO’s mouth in our meeting.
It turns out that the CEO had road-tested this language, firstly with their main investor, and then with their leadership team. My work was discussed in private meetings with important people. And it landed well.
This was all strangely gratifying. Strange because what I was hearing was uncannily close to what I’d written.
How you get your kicks
When I worked in advertising, the end product ran in broadcast media and was seen by pretty much everyone. On occasion - IRN-BRU, Tennent’s Lager, Honda, and a few others - the work truly became part of popular culture. I got off on the ads being talked about. I got off on knowing that other agencies would be jealous.
In my digital days, consumer brands were less interesting. Digital marketing back then wasn’t about reach. And advertising has always been the shitty end of digital work. Interactivity was the thing. The action was with smaller, more precisely defined audiences. So corporate work was cool. The most sought-after briefs involved the arts, education, e-commerce, internal comms, or creating useful software. The gratification came from seeing the impact of the work in hard numbers. We got off on playing with new toys. And we got off on deep interactions rather than broad visibility.
Doing work that never sees the light of day (and being absolutely fine with that)
These days I mostly work with B2B service businesses. And I mostly deal at the top, with the founder or CEO. Working at that level is its own reward. The conversations are better. They want direct advice simply expressed. Brand strategy is tangled up with business strategy, which is fun. Apart from the useful outcomes, the thing I get off on is when a client says, “You really get us, Phil.” That’s the bullseye.
Some of the work I do to get that response is never seen in public, and I’m totally cool with that.
Strategic narrative
I’m courting at the moment. If I get the gig, the work will be almost entirely of the behind-closed-doors variety. The client is doing some significant corporate restructuring behind the scenes, and they need a narrative to make sense of it all. They need to get their story straight for investors and other pinstripe stakeholders. The only public output is likely to be a press release for The City.
There’s a lot of this kind of work out there. And the genre needs a better name than “putting words in the CEOs mouth.”
The better name is Strategic Narrative.
The phrase is already in common use. The proponent of Strategic Narrative with whom I’m most familiar is Andy Raskin. His approach is heavily influenced by what he describes as “the greatest sales deck he’s ever seen,” produced by the SaaS subscription billing platform, Zuora.
The Zuora deck gave Raskin his five-part framework for Strategic Narrative that I’m guessing he uses with all of his clients.
I’m not a fixed framework kind of consultant. I’ve always been wary of productising strategy work. So my Strategic Narrative work will always be bespoke. However, Strategic Narrative is a form of storytelling. It’s another way to tell your irresistible truth. So I do have some principles that this kind of work tends to follow, as illustrated in the diagram below.
I describe each component in detail on a new page on my website. But the idea is that your strategic narrative makes people feel that doing business with you isn’t just the right thing to do, it was meant to be. The outcome of a well-pitched Strategic Narrative is a feeling of inevitability.
You can take the boy out of pitching…
I’ve submitted short proposals for consultancy work, but I’ve never pitched. Now that I don’t do it I can see the madness of pitching for what it is: giving away your thinking and your creativity for free, in return for a 4:1 chance of eventually clawing back the time and money you spent on bringing the work in.
That said, pitching is a lot of fun and I miss it. It’s sad but true that agencies are at their best when they’re pitching.
A Strategic Narrative is a glorified pitch. Indeed, the essence of any Strategic Narrative is the elevator pitch. And the long form is usually some kind of pitch deck, not dissimilar to Zuora’s.
Every pitch I ever won in my agency days followed the principles above.
We framed our pitches with a point of view on the brief. We had a unique perspective on the client’s brand. Or we had a unique take on the brand’s audience. Or we had an insight into the market. We set the scene such that what came next would feel like an idea whose time had come. Our strategy and creative work was framed by the context that we chose for it.
The substance of a pitch is the strategy and the ideas. They have to be great if you’re going to win. But when it’s well framed by context, the work can be more than great. It feels urgent, vital, inevitable. There are times when you can sense this in the room, and you know you’ve won.
That old thing about people forgetting what you said but remembering how you made them feel is a cliché because it’s one of those fundamental truths that you ignore at your peril. Clients remember how you made them feel in the pitch. You made them feel that everything made sense. You helped them imagine a brighter future for their brand. You gave them a whiff of the kudos coming their way for commissioning famous work.
But they’re also buying you. They’re buying an agency as well as buying an idea. So they have to like your style. They have to like how it feels when they imagine working with you. Obviously we all have our own personalities and presentation styles. But there are essential elements of style that apply to any pitch. You have to look like a tight team that works well together. You have to look like you’re enjoying working on the client’s brand. You have to present with conviction. But you also have to demonstrate your willingness to listen and adapt. All of this in a high-stakes, artificial setting.
All that time I thought we were pitching, we were actually giving the client a Strategic Narrative.
Or maybe it’s the other way round. A client commissions me for Strategic Narrative work, but I’m actually giving them a pitch.
Short, straight lines
The context, the substance, and the style have to work in unison. Each has to elevate the others to create that sense of inevitability.
In my experience of pitching, the ones where we didn’t just win, but we smashed it out of the park, were the ones in which the work was great (obviously), but also in which there were short, straight lines between our framing, our strategy, and our ideas. The pitch was dead tight. No holes. No flaws in the logic. Our strategy landed as the inevitable response to the way we’d framed the brief. And the creative work was the inevitable output of the strategy. We gave the client a concentrated, condensed story that was easy to remember and easy to share with people back at the ranch.
Portable compulsion
That, I guess, is the secret sauce of of any great pitch or any Strategic Narrative: it has to be compelling and portable.
The same goes for the irresistible truth of a business or a brand, whatever the format, whatever the vehicle. Portable compulsion is the name of the game.
That works in public. It works in private too.
Here’s that Strategic Narrative link again.
Maybe try this too: Stitching it together. A post about creative consistency and the irresistible truth of Levi’s.