Big Picture Strategy

The Six Choices That Will Transform Your Business

Marta Dapena Baron

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781119712077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

Develop winning brand strategies by focusing your team on the key strategic choices that drive organizational growth and learning. This book presents a system of six practical choices that articulate exactly how to launch and grow brands.

Big Picture Strategy shows readers how limiting and focusing the strategic options available to company stakeholders can unlock previously inaccessible levels of productivity and growth.

Strategist, consultant, and author Marta Dapena Barón describes the six key decisions facing organizations and teams today and how to develop a winning strategy by approaching these decisions systematically. The book includes discussions of:

• The critical choices that leaders must make to define a marketing strategy and to align their teams to be able to execute on it
• The four strategies companies use to launch and grow brands successfully
• How to use strategy-integrated metrics to promote continuous learning in organizations
• How to increase communications efficiency in commercial organizations through the use of a common vocabulary to frame customer-based issues

Unlike many of its competitors, Big Picture Strategy does not pretend that your organization has unlimited resources or capacity to pursue every area of possible strategic advantage. Instead, the author lays out a systematic and integrated choice-based framework that will drive growth in your organization for years to come.

1
Your Strategy, Your Choices

The traditional view of business strategy is that growth requires finding multiple wide-open market spaces, developing a portfolio of diverse breakthrough innovations, and achieving numerous “wins.” But is this really true?

The problem with the “more-is-better” view of strategy is that it is complex and causes businesses to lose focus. Teams and resources are stretched. They are given too many so-called priorities. And, ultimately, they end up with little differentiation between their brand and others in their market.

Blame traditional strategic planning tools. Traditional strategy frameworks lack a systematic way to help businesses narrow down their options. And when it comes to planning and building successful brands, more is simply more, not better.

My work with some of the most successful companies in the world has convinced me that the best commercial plans emerge from constraints – from strategic choices. Some business leaders loathe choice because, in a sense, making a choice means accepting a loss in the hopes of scoring a greater gain. When companies develop customer-based strategy, choosing to focus on a specific group of customers requires that they not focus on others. The loss is clear, and painful to the company that sees each and every customer as a profit-generating opportunity. The gain still needs to be materialized. After all, there are no guarantees that we have chosen the right customer opportunity.

So, rather than developing a strategy that delineates a clear but finite path forward, many organizations develop vague plans that leave their options open. Their teams do not have a single goal but a long list of goals. Some organizations make this noncommittal approach work. After all, when not committed to any single metric, you can claim success when any metric improves.

During my time as VP of Marketing at GE's commercial equipment leasing business, we started the year with a double-digit sales growth goal. By October, as it became apparent the sales goal wasn't going to be met, management would shift to a bottom-line goal and start slashing spending, lowering pricing, and selling loan assets to be able to show a profit by year's end.

This way forward can work in the short term, but it will not deliver sustained growth. Absent a clear strategy that is supported throughout the organization, priorities will shift as personnel do.

Brands that lack a clear strategy can get by and become “familiar” to customers, but because they lack specific meaning, they fail to deliver high value to the organizations that own them. This is what happened to GE Appliances – known for making mid-market appliances but lacking a clear value proposition; Scion cars – focused on young drivers but lacking a youthful design – and Nokia smartphones, which focused on perfecting functionality but missed the importance of software and apps as the iPhone became popular.

Perhaps worst of all, this execution-without-strategy approach stands in the way of organizational learning. If a company doesn't make a choice, it might do well or it might do poorly, but either way, managers won't have a clear sense as to why things played out the way they did.

Giving Up Possibility to Realize Value

Go-to-market choices involve uncertainty because they are made within a system with many moving parts. And, as discussed, committing to a single strategy is hard because it requires giving up all the other possibilities.

But the good news about strategic choice is that just a few big decisions are required to develop with a successful strategic plan. As shown in Figure 1.1, a company needs to only make six choices to build its strategy: the brand, its business category, which bodies or customers to target, which customer beliefs and behaviors to drive, and which specific integrated benchmarks help operationalize the strategy and learn from its results.

FIGURE 1.1 The 6Bs.

There are just six decisions a company must make in developing a go-to-market strategy.

Big Picture Strategy is a choice-based method that generates integrated strategy-through-execution plans. Each choice naturally constrains others that follow. This process forces discipline becaus it comes with strong internal logic that connects all elements.

Each choice bifurcates decision-making and leads to other logical choices, and then to others. Eventually, you build an integrated go-to-market plan – one that enables learning from each strategic cycle.

Teams that use this method end up with plans that actually get executed and measured, as opposed to simply being shelved and forgotten. Big Picture Strategy uses 6Bs to turn strategic planning into a learning tool.

While constraining your choices to drive competitive advantage might sound counterintuitive, the Big Picture Strategy method is very effective. Any business in any industry can use it. A variety of successful companies already use this framework to drive their most critical commercial decisions:

• Johnson & Johnson uses it to develops strategies for its medical device businesses.
• Ecolab deployed the framework to pinpoint growth opportunities in its institutional and food service businesses.
• Copa, the national airline of Panama, has used the framework to build its value proposition and identify relevant metrics, and to communicate strategy throughout the organization.
• Stryker aligns all its medical device business, enabling employees to share a common language to solve commercial problems.
• W.L. Gore develops strategy across its Gore-Tex fabrics business, alongside its industrial and medical device divisions.

Global companies that use the Big Picture method find that teams in disparate geographies learn from each other despite being in different business categories. Even when they use different technologies to solve customer problems, they finally have a lingua franca to communicate about customer-based strategy.

This book explains how to apply this decision-based framework of integrated choice to any business or goal-oriented organization. It is meant to be helpful to executives at any level and to function and in any size company.

This chapter addresses all 6Bs before diving deep into each one in subsequent chapters. But before we begin, I want to expand on the four different strategies that brands use to go to market. In our consulting practice at Big Picture Partners, we use a tool we call the “Go-to-Market Matrix” to compare these four approaches. Selecting one of the four is the foundational choice you need to make to align your organization on a single path forward. This go-to-market choice determines the trajectory of your options for the other six choices.

The Go-to-Market Matrix: Only Four Approaches to Going to Market

No two companies are the same, but when it comes to go-to-market strategy, there are just four approaches. And which of these go-to-market approaches is best depends on the business category orientation of the company, as well as its analysis of customer opportunity.

Throughout many years of working with a wide variety of companies, I have observed that having a strategy is much better than having no strategy at all. Just like that song says: “You gotta have a dream, if you don't have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?”

Choosing a strategic focus, a way to approach the market, is driven by how the company wants to grow.

There are only two ways to grow a brand when you take a...