The four areas of strategy that have taken up 99% of my career

Campaign Strategy. Brand Strategy. Brand Purpose Strategy. Narrative Strategy. Definitions, tips and some honest thoughts for each

One of the more amazing things about the broad discipline of strategy is that we can each find our niche in it that makes us tick, and chances are, because the world is so complicated and layered and messed up, our niche of strategy will be needed by someone or some org. 

And ps: naming certain things is not codified in the world, so, for example, what I call Campaign Strategy someone else might call something else - I’m not trying to be definitive with the below titles, just naming them how I think of them.

Campaign Strategy
This is where my career started: I worked for advertising agencies and we sorted out cross-functional campaigns to get audiences to do something, usually buy something that they didn’t really need but kept the wheels of capitalism moving. 

(Do I sound cynical? I am. Do I have guilt about the fact that I spent a lot of my career filling the world with crap it doesn’t need by preying on people’s insecurities? Yup. Do I realize that this is a really fun area of strategy and something that a lot of us do because not only is it fun but there are bills to pay and rent checks to write? Absolutely. Do I judge you if this is your jam? Nah.) 

Lots of strategies nest under a campaign strategy, but I tend to break it down into three, each of which is a full discipline unto itself: 

• Creative strategy: what and how are we going to say? 

• Engagement strategy: where are we going to put this message?

• Executional strategies: how are we going to slay specific engagement spaces (ie social or comms, etc…) ?

To feed the creative strategy, we drive the underlying foundations of making advertising campaigns by sorting out the 4C’s - who is the consumer, what is the competitive advantage, what is true about the company/product and what culture is vibing with these days.  

In creating the engagement strategy, we build the web of places the creative idea knocks into people. In rolling out the executional strategies, we make sure we are doing the best practices for each platform/space and there’s room for flex and back and forth.

My advice in this area? Be smart AF and learn the rules so you can intelligently break them. There are plenty of teachers, primers, frameworks, tools to learn campaign strategy work. Learn the rules so you can break them. Don’t fall into the trap of getting so caught up in best practices that you lose the muscle of being able to do the mad, new thing. 

Okay, many of us want to be amazeballs and do the mad, new and hopefully brilliant thing, culminating in some sort of lion- or egg-shaped shiny object. How do you take those leaps? Get vicious about developing instincts about your audiences, the culture they live in and the world at large, which means get your head out of LinkedIn and industry mags and focus groups and go live in their world and the world in general. Divergent solutions require divergent inputs. 

Brand Strategy
A brand strategy is setting the overall story, audience, values, principles and key messages of a brand that then gets articulated into an vibe, look, feel, tonality of a brand holistically. You’re creating the foundations of a world which then flows into all of that brand’s creative manifestations, ie logo, colors, tagline, campaigns, content, packaging and product design. 

This is the level at which we have brand guidelines, brand books, brand experiential parameters, templates, brand fonts and colors and all that fun stuff that creates a world for the brand. 

As a strategist, you’re still going to use your 4C’s to build these foundations and you’re best served if you have a handful of kickass designers in your rolodex to make it come to life. 

Brand Purpose Strategy
I have thoughts. 

The brand purpose sits at the company level. It’s the overall why of a company’s existence and usually gets articulated as a vision (the desired future state of the org + the world) and the mission (the daily work to achieve the vision). It’s the rallying story of a company and helps create a shared mental model for all audiences (internal and external).

At my former company Wolf & Wilhelmine, we did a ton of brand purpose work for companies big and small, government entities and non-profit organizations. To get to a brand purpose, I - surprise surprise - use the 4C’s tool, but just raise the altitude on the work so that it applies across the company, versus for just the brand or one product campaign. 

Here’s where it gets really hard: operationalization.

A brand purpose is only so great as much as it gets infused throughout an entire organization, ideally hitting the marketing team last. That means that finance gets it. Procurement gets it. The factory team, the fulfillment team and the policy team get it. R&D gets it, the sustainability team gets it, the IT team gets it. Everyone gets it, breathes it and uses it in their day-to-day decision making. At W&W we called that total infusion “Brand as an Operating System”.

Total infusion is hard AF, especially if you’re trying to shift an entrenched company culture towards a new purpose and aligning capacities towards it. It’s hard to shift entrenched or scaled business models towards purpose as purpose usually has an element of “let’s not fuck the world” and entrenched and/or scaled business rely on systems whose efficiency and profitability are usually predicated on fucking the world. 

Here’s an important distinction to keep in mind: this exercise must transcend the CMO and the Marketing Department and touch the entire C-Suite. If not, it’s a brand strategy exercise and not a purpose one. And that’s okay: just call it and be honest about it. This is important. Because when we are actually doing a brand strategy exercise but calling it a brand purpose, that’s when you find yourself waking up with that pit in the stomach feeling because you realized that you’re using your superpowers to guide a company towards greenwashing or purpose-washing.

(Side rant: My biggest beef with greenwashing and purpose-washing is that it distorts the understanding of orgs that really are making the brave choices, risking profitability and their existence by operating with purpose. It makes it harder for the average consumer that isn’t going to research the hell out of the supply chain of every purchase (of which I am one) to reward the entities that are really doing it. And if we can’t tell the difference and therefore who truly deserves our dollars, well, cue yet another driver of existential fuckery and planetary collapse.)

When should you have your spidey sense on full alert when it comes to brand purpose that might actually be purpose-washing work? When you’re working with a publicly-traded company. At the end of the day, a public company’s first and foremost responsibility is a fiduciary one to their shareholders, and few shareholders have the patience for exercises that mess with efficiency or profitability. 

Here’s a trick if you really are working on a brand purpose exercise: The root of the purpose usually lies in the founding story. Find that founding story and mine it. That makes broader adoption easier, especially amongst legacy companies as you’re just reminding them who they are, versus reinventing their wheel. 

Narrative Strategy 
If you believe that stories precede action, which I do, narrative strategy is the discipline of setting cultural contexts so that action can happen. It creates a broad atmosphere that primes people’s hearts and minds to ultimately act. 

I really dug into this when I led the Engagement team at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The theory was that if we could light up nodes of culture around a topic, we could create a cultural surround - aka voices coming from different directions essentially saying the same thing - that would make change a whole lot easier around societal topics. 

You know who’s really good at this kind of stuff? The Koch Brothers. The Koch brothers set up think tanks in the 1970’s that eventually gained momentum to influence policy while from another angle funded “grassroots” advocacy groups while another arm took care of the DC lobbying and that all coalesced around topics like energy and libertarian politics.

You know who’s been doing this lately? The dairy and meat folks. Have you noticed the anti-processed foods rhetoric all over the place? From articles to OpEds to pro-milk advertising campaigns to soy boy taunts on social to bills being introduced in state legislatures to protect consumers from “really confusing” plant-based meat labels… I’ll eat my cowboy boots if that has proven to truly be an organic swell of opinion and action. 

These narrative surrounds are strategized, orchestrated and funded in concert. And when you get a few nodes lighting up, it has the effect of feeling like we’re “hearing it from everywhere.” Then the flywheel starts turning: other creators and activists and voices add to these narratives, without direct prompting from the original source. And boom! Culture shifts. 

Of the four strategies, this one is the hardest - you’ve gotta know culture, but also have the maturity and connections to build some serious coalitions and get a lot of pieces working in concert. It takes a decent amount of money, either from a billionaire or two at the middle or multiple companies pitching in. 

It can be used to diabolical ends, and I also think it’s hella interesting. Because when I look out into all the noise and voices in the world, I sometimes wonder if it is only through narrative strategies that we can get enough “hits” on an idea for people to really consider a POV and make a change. 

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Okay those are my four:

• Campaign Strategy: for a specific effort to get audiences to do a specific thing, building the foundational understanding of who you're talking to and what you're going to say to them in what spaces.

• Brand Strategy: building the underlying story, audience, values, principles, and key messages of a brand world that gets turned into a brand world that gets manifested across all creative touch points.

• Brand Purpose Strategy: articulating a company's vision and mission and creating the pathways to operationalizing it

• Narrative Strategy: setting cultural contexts so that action can happen

Everyone’s strategy journey is hella personal, so my four won’t be the next strats four. Would love to hear your feedback or thoughts - I’m not madly into the socials these days, but you can find me on LinkedIn or at heidi@hackemer.co.