THE WILD ONES

Most brand strategies are finished the moment they are presented. The deck gets praised, saved to a shared drive, and quietly stops shaping anything. Six months later the team is making the same calls it always made, only now there is a document somewhere that says otherwise.

The gap between knowing and doing

The problem usually is not the thinking. The thinking tends to be fine. The problem is that a strategy written as a set of conclusions gives a team nothing to do on a Tuesday. It tells them what is true without telling them what to choose when two good options pull in different directions.

A strategy earns its keep when it changes a decision someone was about to make anyway. If you cannot point to a choice that looks different because of the work, the work has not started yet.

What seems to travel better

The versions that survive contact with the business share a few traits. They are short enough to hold in your head. They name the thing the company will not do, which is often more useful than the long list of things it might. And they live close to the work, in the tools where decisions actually happen, rather than in a file people open twice a year.

None of this is complicated. It is just easier to write a beautiful conclusion than a usable one.

A simple test

Before the deck goes out, try removing every slide that does not change a decision. What remains is usually the strategy. The rest was context, and context is cheap.