June 2023
Lost in Translation
Strategy is in danger of framework f*cking itself into obsolescence. Here's how we're trying to fix it.
Let’s start here:
There’s no need to spend a ton of time recapping the spring that brands and advertisers had: a consistent stream of layoffs and “right-sizing” (but also more hiring?), budgets shrinking like George Costanza in the pool, not to mention the increased paranoia that comes from a class of people looking for anything they can label “woke” and boycott or threaten with glee.
Many of these challenges are not by any means sudden, but instead a reflection of how the past few years have brought innumerable changes to the brand world, mostly in how marketing can be created, produced, spread, and consumed. As we’ve talked about here before, the traditional marketing funnel has collapsed, forcing brands to evaluate every step of their process to find ways to better reflect the moment we are in. That reshuffling - of priorities, what success looks like, organizational structures, etc. - is nowhere near finished.
Setting aside instances where those adjustments purely serve to increase margins in questionable manners, these changes - some small, some massive - have mostly been necessary so that brands and marketers can continue to compete. As I love to say, the competition today isn’t adidas versus Nike, but adidas versus anyone or thing that puts content in your devices every day, and that reality has created the impetus for lots of changes to creative and production functions. There are the constantly shifting budgets to newer, sexier platforms that the audience of the moment loves; the changing creative outputs & production styles to better match current trends and get content live in the world faster; a new system of reliance on creators & influencers over classic agency creatives in certain circumstances; all of these and more are examples of how the creative response to the briefs at hand has been forced to adjust - sometimes quite rapidly - to the demands of clients and ultimately audience.
So where brand stories are told has changed, who tells brand stories has changed, the way we create, produce, and place those stories has changed. But what about what comes before the brief? What about strategy? How has strategy adjusted to meet this moment?
For a period of time…
…in the mid-2010s, as the changes discussed above started to create ripples around the industry, strategy structures went niche. I remember briefly being at an agency (starts with Droga ends with 5) in 2015 that had brand strategists, data strategists, comms strategists, and social strategists in nearly every meeting, and for a moment that felt like the right call. With so much changing so rapidly across every landscape, the more brains you could involve with specialty expertise the better. (In fact, I recall many agencies pitching the depth of the specialist bench as a key selling point.)
But as the speed of change became commonplace, and the idea of a specialist in something like “social” started to feel like it actually encompassed almost everything a brand did or said, the increasing overlaps in roles & responsibilities became too hard to ignore. Plus, it’s also true that increased eyeballs on the work also meant increased time spent, payroll costs, and naturally, delays. It made it harder for the work to have a singular strategic vision, and often a brand’s fractured content across channels felt like they were talking out both sides of their mouth, or from different mouths altogether (the “brand twitter” phase being an obvious example of this).
Those disconnects are still very real for many brands today, and the fault doesn’t necessarily lie at the feet of the strategists themselves, but more so the state of the strategic process and how it doesn’t reflect the way clients act in reality. There are so many examples of where the fall-down points are, but over the last few years I’ve seen these four the most:
Some brands become too insular and see the world through themselves and not the eyes of their consumer. This leads to strategy work that feels powerful on the inside but doesn’t connect with the world everyone else is living in.
Sometimes the brand is only focused on the immediate future due to budget or other restraints, so the strategy ends up lacking long-term context or support.
Sometimes the realities of what the brand can actually do and what it wants to be seen as are very different. This can lead to a long, drawn-out brand strategy process that results in a beautifully designed deck of platitudes, only to immediately be tossed at the feet of a social team that has no idea how to turn a lofty positioning into their three budgeted monthly TikToks.
Sometimes a brand rushes to make and deliver ads for a big media buy and dismisses building a strategy altogether. Then when the money tap runs low they are shocked to discover interest in the brand has disappeared, too. Money can solve a lot of problems (and is a core component of the “influence” portion in my Science of Hype), but it can’t fix a lack of strategic rigor when it’s all gone.
A common theme through all of these challenges is impatience. Brands want virality but not to understand the strategy work that goes into making sure the story told when you do go viral is the right one. Or they just picked a new agency and want to see the work out in the world immediately, regardless of how different the business realities are from the strategy & creative they were pitched. Or, worst of all for strategists, they don’t see the value in strategy and want to cut it entirely in favor of finding a “strategy” in the execution.
And yet, with all of these disconnects happening in the process, and all of this impatience coming from clients that’s only intensifying, the ways I’ve seen agencies do strategy largely haven’t changed to meet the moment. There are outliers for sure, but the majority of strategy done today is being retrofitted from the frameworks of old, not built from something new.
The totality of these challenges…
…is part of what led my cofounder Alexa & I to launch Quick Study almost a year ago. We wanted to see if you could build a new strategic process from the ground up that eliminated chances for disconnects and turned impatience into a forcing function for clients & strategists alike.
Spoiler alert: Our newsystem is working incredibly well and loved by clients.
Here are just a few of the areas where we’ve begun to see success when pushing the traditional process to something new:
Better recognition of the true ask versus what’s in the RFP. We create a short custom questionnaire that is answered by all key stakeholders at the beginning of the process. We ask about things like the state of the business as seen through the eyes of the respondent, their goals, and their hopes for the outcome of the project. To prove how helpful this is: in our first year, we’ve never seen true, 100% alignment from the internal stakeholder team to those answers on any of our projects. This immediately reveals points of discussion and needed internal alignments that can help make a strategy actually useful.
More interactions with key clients to create shared ownership of the work & results. Each step of our process includes a workshop or discussion session with the key decision-makers on the project. This forces senior clients to recognize & accept that this work requires them to invest their most treasured asset - time - and the end result is a well-informed group that feels closer to the final outputs and are actually excited to bring them to life.
Speed to answers. Our core offering is a 4-ish week sprint to a final output, with 3 key deliverables along the way to keep the process iterative and involved. Getting the right folks in the room from the point above also allows us to make this speed possible - it eliminates rounds of reviews and makes time a forcing function so the process moves efficiently.
Keeping strategy involved always. As our strategy lead, I sit in on every conversation from onboarding to process to whatever else may arise. The best strategists usually find great nuggets of information in the most non-strategy of places, and this mentality has become key to helping us learn more about where to push, dig, and question.
Outputs that consider the whole board. Creating a strategy with contextual awareness is one area where we feel it’s paramount to think beyond the brief and roadmap the future. Showing how all the parts connect for the quarter, year, or whatever length of time the strategy being built is meant to be relevant is key to creating lasting success instead of a one-off throwaway.
When I described Quick Study on Mark Pollard’s podcast earlier this year, he joked that bloat is how you make money, and to see where Quick Study is on the question of speed and doing our work on a project basis in 3 years. He’s not wrong to acknowledge what we’re attempting is off the beaten path, and I’m happy to admit that few projects in year one have been able to live up to the lofty speeds we look to provide (client schedules being the top reason for delays). I also recognize that not all of these changes are possible in the traditional agency structure, but that’s kind of the point. With so much disruption happening around strategy, why hasn’t more come to how strategy itself is done? It felt imperative to challenge the process of strategy itself, like we would with any client.
As we near a year in, I’m grateful to our clients for being open to taking a risk and approaching strategy in a different way. We’ve proven that Quick Study 1.0 works, is repeatable, and responds well to constructive criticism (mostly from ourselves) in service of being sharper and sparking growth. We’ve learned how to flex without breaking the integrity of the system, even as we swing from creating brand playbooks to consumer research and seasonal retail storytelling; from comms positionings and tone of voice approaches to pioneering new brand partnership processes. So thank you to Naked Cashmere, Major League Soccer & Cornerstone, Crush soda at Keurig Dr. Pepper, CIC, and the many teams at adidas we’ve had the pleasure to work with thus far. Our goal for year 2 is to continue to deliver excellent thinking through new means, and have fun while doing it. If that sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, don’t hesitate to let us know.
Global CEOs are saying Quick Study “moves at light speed without compromising on research and quality” and that we are “the real deal—the kind of team you want in your corner for all the big, gnarly, complex ‘how are we ever going to solve this?’ problems.” If your brand needs some smart problem solving, commission Quick Study to make a Study Guide for you.
Send us an email & we’ll custom design a plan that gets you the answers you need: hello@quick.study