Why and How Challenger Brands Succeed For Brand Leaders

The challenger brand model is a strategic approach to a market that works for aspirational brands which wish to take ownership and consolidate a particular position for their unique offering within a market. The challenger brand model is business strategy that changes the landscape of a market, by shifting the entire premises of a market's assumptions about its underlying structure.  Changing the premises of the market's structure is how disruptive technologies are brought to market by challenger brands.

The fundamental premise of challenger brand model is that it is a whole business strategy for the business, not just the marketing and sales functions. The challenger brand model success relies upon it being a clear strategically focused in carrying the whole business into a new place within its market sector(s), not just routes to market into a true partnership throughout the entire value pipeline.

What is a Challenger Brand?

A challenger brand is a business which identifies and develops a clear focus within a market. Typically challenger brands have grown into an area of specialisation within a market sector. Either by focusing on a specific subset of the market or a certain demographic requirement within a market.  They by definition challenge the status quo of a market. They can be seen in virtually every market and therefore have no common identity due to very diverse nature of markets.  

Challenger brands do demonstrate a clear identify within their market. That clarity of a challengers identity is a vital first step. Challengers want and must stand out from the mainstream. They must be distinctive within their market. Defining what they stand for must be clear and consistent over time. You cannot challenge if you do not stand out and stand for your identity. 

Challenger Brands Challenge Perceptions

Challenger brands which are always consistent is that you are on a mission to change the industry.  What you are changing and why is vital to communicate to your core target audience. That enables challenger brands to take premium positions within markets as they focus on their alternative value proposition within any market. Starling Bank and Apple for example despite being 40 years apart both successfully have created a successful premium challenger position within their markets.

Challenger brands are emotional brands. People buy the value proposition either from aspirational leaders and from bold statements about the real value they offer to people who value what they do.  This emotional message is often linked to transformative message which the business will deliver to the market. Challengers focus on the future growth of the market and how the challenger today will be the dominant market player in the future. That constant message of a brighter future with the challenger is always about how the challenger brand will make change brand today will be the mainstream in tomorrow's world.

Challengers Brands Create New Value

This shift is about proactive participation in the challenger attitude within a market by a series of partners. The challenger model creates a new value stream ultimately to customers, but actually to all stakeholders involved in creating the challenger position within a market. Challenger brand models are actually not just about sales people selling in a different way, but far more; they are about businesses identifying that in maturing markets defining their premium and sustainable position within that market is more than just desirable but an essential suitable position to own.

 

The challenger brand model has four fundamental underlying principles for it to be successful. It is not just about selling, having challenger sales people, but about changing everything about the organisation.  

Its Never Just About Changing The Sales Strategy

For a company to start its journey into the position of challenger brand the first principle is that whole organisation must make a step change in their attitude and approach to their customers. If the culture of a business is purely sales focused then moving it to a relationship one is a simple evolutionary step, but moving to a challenger one is not a simple next step, but a cultural shift, a huge leap of faith and complete organisational cultural shift. 

This step change is one reason why many companies aspire to being challengers within their market, but in reality they are still transactional relationship in nature. Successful challenger brands do not just tell their sales people to become a challenger brand, for a successful brand to succeed as a challenger brand it must be a complete top down vision owned and delivered across the whole organisation.  

The debate is one of nature versus nurture

Can a company move away from simply selling what they have, to identifying and developing long term customer values, what tomorrow’s customer is going to value within a brand. Can the organisation communicate its true values rather than selling what it has today.  Putting it simply; can a company walk away from a short-term sales culture to challenge industry perceptions. 

In my background I have worked for brands that have achieved that, and seen brand’s such as Patagonia sustain the challenger market position successfully and change the market to their challenger position. Premium brands achieve the challenger positions through visionary leadership and sustain it by creating champions throughout the whole industry, not just through sales people selling differently to others.

Challenger selling: Mindset shift

The second principle of successful challenger brands is that everyone within the brand has engage in conversations with stakeholders to shift the mindset of an industry. Complete belief from within the whole team of the company culture is a must. That creates a sector tension within any market. Apple, that iconic challenger brand took on Microsoft and others, by challenging the status of computing as technical, Apple made them simple and beautiful. They work for us, not us for them. That tension with customers and the whole supply chain successfully challenged assumptions and took that challenger role from computers to phones, watches and even TV’s, redefining the markets within which it chooses to compete.   

For challenger brands to succeed they must challenge with a uniquely defined position within a market.  Belief and education are central to challenger brands success. Everyone must believe, not just the sale person, but the whole organisation must have a unified cultural belief in the challenger position.

Engagement and communication must be clear and demonstrate the innovation which the challenger brand operates.  Simon Sinek talks about the power of WHY, when describing Apple’s approach to the market. The brand’s ability to communicate at all levels creates interest and desire within target audiences. Target audiences, those who just get it, become converts to the way in which a challenge brand operates creates people with a passion, converts who believe and can communicate that belief clearly. 

Education is at the heart of successful challenger brands. While they create factual and emotional arguments which people buy into, they can sustain and develop their challenger position. Education is not just talking to passionate followers or clever innovations, it is far more. It is the continued striving to re-enforce that challenger position, what it is why it matters to all stakeholders and how it differentiates the brand from other and form other potential new entrants or alternative options. These are most effectively delivered through insights into customer behavior inextricably linked to core causes and themes, which that challenger brand espouses.  This continued consistent communication re-enforces the challenger brand’s position and moves the brand from innovator market positions into aspiring early majority markets of both intermediate channels to market and audiences.  

Successful Challenger Brands

Successful challenger brands, defend their market position, not through hostile language, ‘we are better than you because….’ But through resonance with audience types personalities.  Each challenger brand’s communication sounds like ‘people who value XYZ value us because we resonate with their values’.

That resonance is not designed to appeal to everyone, in fact successful challenger brands focus on key target segment consumer motivations. They sacrifice the majority status quo and look to occupy premium places within markets which are defensible and sustainable. They look at tomorrow’s market needs and drive behavioural shifts in customers attitude to brand engagement. Apple’s drive into apps, live streaming, integrated products and services, all move audiences into engagement with the brand in a different way than any other ‘computer’ company.     

Control, and taking control is therefore at the heart of a challenger brand’s success. Communication is only relevant if it engages with those who can influence decision-making. Effective communication by challenger brands is about controlling the communication where and when it matters.  Challenger brands focus on communication only where they can successfully challenge, they converse on their ground and in their language. They create a new language of products and services not to differentiate but to identify the value they deliver in their unique language, so conversing inside the brand becomes an integral part of buying into the brand.

Challenger brands only talk about value, challenging the customer’s thinking and pre-conceived perceptions in their decision-making process.  It is never negative, always a positive solution being provided by challenger brands. The irony being that they most successfully challenge when they do it non-aggressively and non-directly. They don’t look to compete in the same way as the industry norms, but through looking at challenging the status quo in every way. That approach creates positive tension, the implied question is why would you not buy this brand, this way of life, rather than buy us over them.

Challenger Brands Offer Enhanced Value 

Third principle that makes challenger brands successful is that they are premium players within any market. That requires a complete integration of attitudes and approaches within the company and its complete supply chain. Challenger brands are always premium players, they invest in being in the space at the top of the market, and the price they charge is a result of their challenger success. It is investment into innovation in both product, service and value chain activities. 

Being a challenger brand also relies on the brand investing in its customer targeting of key prospects, not just end customer segmentation but also in every step in the customer journey. That creates an targeted up-front prospecting and focused pipeline management   Those investments result in higher closing ratios than industry averages.

Challenger Brand Leadership Skills

Becoming a challenger brand within a market requires the right type of people, and this is the fourth principle behind a successful challenger brand. Traditional order takers and short-term management and leadership people will not ideally fit with a challenger sales brand. So moving a brand, or creating a challenger sales brand requires an organizational shift in behaviours, competencies and capabilities across the whole company.  Changing behaviours of all employees takes time and leadership, it does not happen over night and measuring the results is not easy.  Rather than just measuring the sales, the leadership need to measure the quality of the customers and the engagements that occur. 

At the heart of becoming a challenger brand is to understand the unique position which that position within the market it delivers.  Brands such as Apple, Patagonia and Tesla have all successfully taken clear positions within their respective markets’ by being challenger brands. By changing the established perception of a market, challenger brands succeed because they deliver more value at every point of the relationship. It takes a strategic long-term approach for a challenger brand to achieve that success, and that takes leadership with vision.

Learn more about how to develop successful business strategy click the link to buy the book:- Strategy: The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategy-Leaders-Successful-leaders-business/dp/1508761965

Strategy: The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay

Strategy The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay

Strategy The Leader's Role is a book which brings together courses all the key tools which a leader needs to use to create a successful business strategy. 

These tools are carefully explained, with step-by-step guides as to what and how to develop your business strategy. 

Each step builds upon one another enabling the leaders to develop a comprehensive business strategy to lead your business successfully.

The Importance of Strategy

The leader is the person ultimately in charge of defining the corporate goals of any organisation. It is the one role which a leader cannot delegate.  Strategy is the course to take to achieve your organisation goals. 

Without a strategy any organisation drifts aimlessly within its market, loosing its position and its customers. A clear set of goals allows a strategy  to be developed to achieve those goals, enabling the organisation to focus, find its direction and pull together towards those goals. 

Strategy: The Leader's Role by Richard Gourlay, provides both the hard tools to assess and develop your goals and strategy and the soft tools which enables leader's to successfully implement those strategic shifts within their organisation.     

Leading From the Front

It is difficult to lead if you don't know where you are going and in this book, Richard Gourlay explains how to use key tools and concepts to assess your market and define your goals and set your direction of travel. How to weed out the noise which often drowns the clarity of thinking which leader's need to see where markets are going and enables them to define their vision for their organisation. 

Leading from the front can only happen if a leader is confident of where they are going and why they are taking that route. This book provides that clarity of purpose for leaders to assess and understand how to define what matters form what does not so that they can step up and out and lead from teh front.

Strategy: The Leader's Role 

In Strategy: The Leader's Role each step in building your vision, goals and strategy is explained with relevant tools and aids to enable you to develop your own unique strategy to fit you and your organisations circumstances. 

From assessing your core competancies as an organisation through to understanding where your market (s) are going. Strategy the Leader's Role explains in step by step chapters how to undertake your own assessment with models an examples of how others have achieved their strategy.

Tools include external market assessments well as internal market assessment tools to create strategic options. How to assess your organisational capability as well as how to use theses to create a strategic advantage. 

To buy this business book, just click the image or the link below:-    

To buy this book today, click this link NOW: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Strategy-Leaders-Successful-leaders-business/dp/1508761965

Strategic Vision Drives Organisations Success 

Drive Your Vision or Aimlessly Drift!

In today’s world, driving your business vision is the only way to ensure you stay focused on where you want to go and not pulled by short-term fads and fashions. 

The words strategic planning used to mean a once a year offsite discussion about where the organisation is headed. That thinking would be turned into an updated business plan with expectations and outcomes to be delivered over that next year. That type of strategic planning the corporate away-day provide very little in the way of strategic thinking and subsequently provided no or very little strategic value. Corporate away days became more a morale booster, with team building and bonding as the only measure of development. The reason why was very simple, if there is no strategic intent, no strategic review or re-evaluation them there will be no strategic outcomes.   

Strategic thinking is more vital today for leaders of organisation than ever before. The need for organisations of any shape and size to be able to determine why they exist and where they intend to exist in their market has never ben stronger. Whether it is new players finding their first footing in their market, through to established players redefining where they are within their sector, the need for leaders to define their vision and validate their strategy to achieve that vision has become more critical than ever. The drivers of urgency are not just those of ever more powerful stakeholder expectation, but more demonstrably the globalisation of every market sector and the transparency of strategy in what it delivers to business. 

Problems with Strategic Thinking

The problem building a long-term strategic plan, the traditional cycle of business planning is that it is too long and therefore slow to react to rapidly changing business environments; particularly the slow speed of implementing traditional business plans, which has damaged the reputation and credibility of strategy. 

The slow pace of organizational change driven by traditional strategic business planning results in strategies which are out-of-date before they ready to deploy. 

The net result of this process is that organizations are sluggish to respond in fast-changing markets, left wrong-footed by new entrants in dynamic, high-growth markets leaving leaders frustrated and impotent in competing with agile, new entrants. In an technology driven world where disruptive online behaviours enable markets and customers to change overnight, thinking strategically can seen to be an outdated way of thinking.     

Developing effective strategies is vitally important because without them organisations become inward looking, focusing on efficiency at the expense of growth opportunity. Without strategic thinking leadership teams becomes operationally efficiency driven rather than customer focused.  

The key element of strategic thinking is the ability of leadership teams to look at what is driving change within any sector. Inspiring vision is about drawing intelligence from scratchy, vague or even 'invisible' data to make informed decisions about tomorrow's market and develop an aspirational strategy to achieve that vision.

Planning for Tomorrow

What do we know about what tomorrow will look like and what opportunities it will offer? Here are my five defining statements about the need for strategic thinking:- 

1. It will happen whether we like it or not.
2. Markets are always changing, new opportunities are always arising.
3. If organisations strategically plan ahead they can successfully compete, rather than just survive by being a me too player.
4. Strategic thinking has to be achieved and implemented faster than a market is developing if players wish to stay or move into more profitable, growing and sustainable market segments.
5.  Without strategic thinking every organisation will go backwards in its market.

The Strategy Gap

The strategy gap: the lack of proactive strategic thinking is most often blamed on the lack of hard data 'facts' as the basis of making defined decisions. This has always been a factor in undermining the confidence leaders have in making plans for the future. 

As a result, strategic planning often focused on predicting the future based on historic trend lines, over-invest in gathering all available data, and produced a small number of safe directives often focused around the very near future, for the rest of the organization to execute.

This safety first approach to strategic planning leads to little steps, but is not really strategic thinking.  

"Genuine strategic thinking requires leaders to think of the future not based upon the past, but based upon the future market potential".   

                                                                        Richard Gourlay

With the advent of the internet there is now huge amounts of easily accessible affordable good data which is instantly and cheap to acquire. The world today has become a turbulent place, speed of change is no longer slowly evolutionary, but has become rapidly revolutionary in virtually every market. 

This has left the traditional strategic planning process with a fundamental problem, since the trusted, traditional and slow approach to strategic planning is based on assumptions that no longer hold. The static strategic plan is dead.

So why do strategy at all?  

Strategy is therefore under pressure as a process unlike never before.  If the outputs from traditional strategy, a traditional business plan with incremental evolution are no longer valued, then the value of strategy is being rightly questioned.  

The reason why strategy is not dead is that the strategic process, the way strategy is developed is essential in learning what is ‘right’, what is the future in a business sector.  This strategic approach to step out of your organisation and look at the market, defining internal aspirations and building the steps through experimental activity and forward pattern development enables shift culture to occur enabling agile strategy to be deployed. 

There are many renaming ceremonies for today's strategy process, all focusing on the move to redefine the strategic planning process, away from the traditional top-down long-term evolutionary strategic planning process to quicker, dynamic and responsive strategic thinking culture. This systematic and seismic shift in thinking away from process driven top down command and control process to one of continual strategic thinking culture. 

To make this shift to modern strategic thinking, leaders need to move away from traditional predictive planning to rapid prototyping supported by multifaceted experimenting.     

The second shift is that of 'frontline first' where leaders must enable the frontline with real decision-making authority. Successful strategic thinking requires objective and direction setting with a whole team focus.  Instead of a plan, the planning process is about whole team involvement in the mindset of goal achievement.              

The third and final major shift leaders need to focus on where the organisation is adding value to customers. As markets and customers rapidly change, who would have thought Google, the online search engine would be producing driverless cars, or Apple the IT company is managing middle-class health. 

What value any organisation customers value and are looking for is one of the major shifts which today's digital age is driving.   

 https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Leaders-Successful-leaders-business/dp/1508761965

Author Richard Gourlay, provides mentoring and leadership support to leaders, learn more click here

Leaders Must Look Beyond The Horizon For Success

(Five Tips For Moving Beyond Certainty in Business)

It is always easy to look backwards and see how a business has evolved to where it is today, than to look at where a business is today and predict where it will go in the future. Looking backwards from essence of an idea, to the formative stage in which it was created and how it has evolved to where it is now, journeys look logical and rationale. When leaders look at their business, the rational behind the direction setting they took seems obvious today and makes perfect sense, but the truth is that at the time of making those vital decisions it was not.  

Making decisions about the future is never easy and certainly not simple. The lack of information about the future, the uncertainty of what will happen within any sector and the singularity of ownership of the big decision weight on leaders minds often leads to procrastination and delay.

Seeing beyond the horizon, to what the world will look like in three to five years time requires leaders to look beyond today's certainty over the horizon into uncertainty if they wish to succeed. What makes some leaders succeed in moving beyond the known is not just having an idea, but to create sustain and drive towards their passion. Being willing and able to think beyond the known an visible to see a world which does not yet exist.

I am sure you have seen the list of six famous failures, from Albert Einstein to the Beatles. All of whom ended up succeeding, but at the time of their big decisions they were unknown, from Walt Disney who was fired from newspaper for "lacking imagination" or Oprah Winfrey who was demoted from being a news anchor because she "wasn't fit for television".  If they had listened to only those voices where would they be today. Would the Beatles have bounced back from Decca records, would Steve Jobs have fought back to success having been fired from his own company by the man he hired, had they not had the determination, advice and courage to make tough decisions about the unknown future.    

There is a simple phrase which I often use when talking with directors as a mentor, "What's your Vision" and within that simple three word question I am asking a whole series of questions about the leadership I am talking with. Who are they, where are they going and most importantly of all why do they think they are right?

Here are five business tips to help leaders move beyond the certainty of their role.

Five Business Tips for Moving Beyond Certainty

1. Create your Vision!  (Define your destination, goal or dream which you believe you can deliver)

2. Collect people to believe in you and your passion and abilities. (Successful leaders surround themselves with people who believe in them, challenge them and keep them on the ground throughout their journey)

3. Keep being curious and challenge the status quo. (Its Not why, but why not?  Success as a leader is always about challenging, to see new and emerging opportunities).

4. Stretch the limits and push beyond your comfort zone. (If you believe in something you must push beyond the known to open up new possibilities, you can only do this if you stretch yourself)

5. Keep researching your vision (Leaders too often create a vision and then stop developing, stop redefining and stop seeing how the market is changing until their vision fails)

These five #businesstips will help leaders see and move beyond the certainty of what they can see in business and develop the #mindset and #robustness as a leader. Leadership is not a natural gift, its takes time and continual investment in development and redeveloping your skills to face and succeed in leading people to face new challenges beyond the certainty of what already exists.  

• Like to know more about #leadership skills then click here: www.richardgourlay.com/leadership-is-all-about-vision-2/
• Read more blogs by Richard Gourlay cowdenconsulting.blogspot.dk/.../richard-gourlay-was-born-in-scotland-i...

• Learn more about Richard Gourlay: www.richardgourlay.com/author/richard/

Regards

Richard Gourlay

Leadership Development, Strategic Leadership, #Dumfries and #Galloway, #Scotland

Strategy v Culture – They Aren't Opposites 

Is culture more important than strategy, or is strategy more important than culture?

This classic question has grow in the mindset of leaders in recent years as the rise of culture in the workplace is recognised for its importance not only in improving performance but in driving whole enterprise competitiveness. For anyone familiar wth the McKinsey S7 model will know that the shared values within any organisation ultimately drive the delivery of both the hard 'S' factors, (strategy, systems and structure) and the soft 'S' factors (skills, staff and style). 

McKinsey 7S model for ANY Business

The focus today on culture over strategy is really a misunderstanding of the importance of strategic thinking in business. The relationship between strategy and culture is in fact  one of mutual dependence. Without a clear strategic vision in place, thoroughly developed by the leadership team, then no amount of investment in culture will deliver improved bottom-line business performance.  

Culture, is actually an integral part of delivering / implementing any business strategy. If you cannot motivate people to successfully work together, to be more than the sum of their parts then the leadership team cannot deliver its strategic vision.  Therefore strategy and culture are mutual partners in any successful enterprise. What you do, matters just as much as how you do it. Simon Sinek's the 'Power of Why' is an excellent explanation of the mutual nature of culture and strategy combining. 

Is Business Strategy Failing?

So why do so many organisations quote that only 20% to 30% of their strategic initiates succeed? Figures such as these immediately make leaders think about culture as the primary driver of successful organisations, rather than focusing on strategy. The additional value of culture as a driver of enhanced performance within a sector is primarily seen in high-value service led west-coast millennial businesses, (which are the ones always quoted), by cultural advocates who so often tag brands such as Apple, Google and Facebook. 

While looking at these types of new business, its easy to see their culture at work and how it improves performance within the workplace, but what underpins every one of them is that they have their successfully developed strategies in place, which underpin and drive their success.  

The passion with which these organisations promote their cultural identify would make it look as if their success is due solely due to their unique culture, but if that was the case then companies such as Bebo and Myspace would also be quoted as outstanding examples of success in west-coast culture. 

The Cultural Advantage 

A positive and rewarding culture can drive a successful strategy deployment quicker and more dynamically than their competition. This type of competitive advantage can deliver  rapid emergence of a new entrant, or accelerate a high-growth competitive business within a dynamically developing market. 

The key aspect of a vibrant company culture is that it creates an inspiring work-place, which enables the rapid deployment of a strategy coupled with the flexibility to respond to change quicker than the competition, often through empowerment of employees to take ownership of decision making at the front-line.

This cultural advantage in business enables those businesses able to enhance their cultural identity to outcompete their competition in emerging and rapidly developing markets effectively, but it does not replace sound strategic thinking, it just supports and allows rapid acceleration of a strategy being delivered successfully. There is in effect a symbiotic relationship between a successful strategy and the culture within which it is delivered.    

Those leaders who focus on culture rather than strategy are chasing the defining differentiation within the market, rather than the fundamental definition of any business. No matter in what sector you are operating within without a fundamental strategic purpose no business can succeed. 

Results Only Work Environments ROWE

Dan Pink in his excellent book DRIVE talks about Results Only Work Environments ROWE, where employees are free to work on their own projects for a period of their work. The apparent results show that businesses like Google found that about half their profits came from work undertaken by 20% of employees time. 

While this sounds an outstanding impact of culture in driving results, it does not always reflect the reality. The controls put in place within an organisation direct where the employee puts their energies in ROWE, so they are not free, more managed towards projects that fit within strategic parameters. Secondly many projects which people work on are dream projects which enhance the base functions of the organisation, or they department, so that ROWE work extends or commercialises work within organisations rather than is purely derived from a ROWE culture. This is not to decry a ROWE culture, which can be inspiring but it is important to understand that ROWE cultures are not a panacea for success.   

Culture cannot replace strategy, it might camouflage a weak or lapsed strategy for a short time, but no matter how much spirit there is within any workplace without a long term strategy no business will succeed. While cultural evangelists passionately quote Apple, they quietly forget Nokia or Motorola as organisations, who both had positive cultures, Motorola invented the mobile phone and Nokia was the definition of innovation for many years, but who have been let down by strategic failures.     

Strategy development, an often misunderstood leadership skill-set, has become a phrase to describe everything from an aspirational dream through to a quick win tactic. This ubiquitous  usage of the word of strategy attaching it to everything has heavily damaged and de-valued it, compared with the fairytale soft skill cinderella which is culture.   

Strategy Defines An Organisation's Purpose

Success is not just about having a clearly defined strategy, it is about having a strategic intent within the leadership which makes an organisation able to succeed. If the leadership has a clear direction and focus for the business, combining both the external view rigorously developed integrated, coupled with the internal focus on core competences, then that business can outcompete its competitors. 

Organisations led by strategic thinkers who focus on growth within their sector, by looking beyond the horizon and developing a clear understanding of where their market is going and therefore how to develop an advantage in their market. How the leadership use those advantages, how fast they can develop and implement strategies, relies upon the belief others have in that strategic vision.                 

Without strategic thinking, organisations will not succeed, here's why. Strategy underpins success, not just because it provides a focus for all activity within an organisation, but organisations with a strategic purpose attract the best talent, develop the best talent to deliver and retain the talent by providing them with a results focused purpose to stay and develop their talent further. 

Without that ability to provide a purpose for talented people, they will not come, develop or stay. That ability, which only a strategic drive can deliver, underpins the purpose of an organisation, its the clear goal focused approach, which drives the existence of a positive cultural environment, where the value of culture can make a difference in competitive performance.       

           

The Solution

Fundamentally leadership is about driving change, and that can only come from the leadership themselves.  You can't  delegate strategy or structural change, you have to own it live, believe it and drive it relentlessly until it achieves not a paper model but a realisation in achieving tangible outcomes towards strategic goals. Building the 'strategic model' is not strategic leadership, that is just dreaming it, it is the  'built it and they will come' approach to strategy.     

Having a great strategy is only a small part of the real challenge which leaders face. Being able to execute their entire plan, requires the ability to visualise their strategy as the big picture for the business and being able to communicate it to all levels of stakeholder with personal conviction which creates and sustains the momentum you need for your strategy to succeed. That means by beginning with the end in mind, that clear strategic objectives which fit into the future which the leadership team must believe in and focus on with ambitious and measurable goals.

Successful leadership must engage all the people throughout their organisation, so that hey all understand the strategic drivers that are creating and driving the market within which they operate. Only through open and frank discussion can leadership teams enable employees to understand the drivers and implications of change within the organisation will they be able to carry people through the change process successfully.

Summary: Strategy V Culture, it takes one to have the other.

It is not the case of culture eats strategy, if you look at successful businesses and organisations around the world, a great strategy, well thought out resourced, driven and supported will deliver bottomline results. Great strategic thinking, creates, nurtures and sustains dynamic cultures within organisations, which in turn drive strategic thinking to new heights, creating brand leaders in every sector of industry. But short-term thinking and a lack of investing in leadership skills, robust strategic thinking processes and people investment will continue to hamper the success of strategy in business today.

Author Richard Gourlay provides strategic planning consultancy to business leaders to grow and develop their business skills. 

Learn more at www.cowdenconsulting.com or www.richardgourlay.com

   

How to Market Using Social Media

This afternoon I was writing some notes for a client for who I have just developed a new strategy with a flagship product to drive their position within their chosen market, and as I started to explain how to implement their social media it dawned on me that this would be useful to many other businesses owners and leaders as well. 

Social Media 

The problem with social media is that people are always trying to sell on first meeting, like a new toy everyone wants to play with and some that just doing social media is like selling online. This inevitably fails. Why? Well it is like walking up to someone at a networking event shaking their hand, giving them your name and saying do you want to buy my product/service? What is the chance of success? Even for the most successful sales person it is going to be zero, or worse, even a realistic prospect will be turned off by this approach, because the audience does not know you, your products / services and is not tuned into to thinking about their needs or wants at that time.  

Social media is not The Wolf of Wall Street 

You would never just go up to anyone and start selling, this attitude comes close the perception of the 1980's (Think Wolf of Wall Street) which was typified by the ABC (Always Be Closing) approach to selling. It did not work then and it certainly does not work now. Yet in the field of social media where there is no personal handshake people forget that opening with a cheesy sales line is likely to result in someone reacting with an unfriend/disconnect approach or worse a negative review of what you do. 

In the digital world of social media, the rules of engagement have not changed. People are still people, not fools and not mugs, so don't treat them like they are. A poor first impresssion reflects on you as the connector not on them as the recipient, with the added disadvantage that there is an audit trail and an attentive viewing and engaging audience, two things which can be more damaging to a brand than any traditional sales person could achieve on their own.

So here are the key steps I suggest you undertake in using social media to open up new markets and develop your customer base using social media:

7 Steps in Social Media Marketing

1. Define your target customers and routes to them through researching target customers social media activity 
2. Connect to them using social media and identify conversations with them and direct them to open conversations on premises.   
3. Look at who is responding and looking for further information, support them with further information and options.
4. Invite them to join your online communities (LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest etc) 
5. Connect with them personally with further information and add them to your existing marketing database, marketing as part of the funnel development.
6. Listen to their engagement with you to engage with them when they are researching relocation.
7. Then and only then can you can start selling to them.

These steps provide a good first principles in finding you way into the world of social media for companies looking to understand this new world order of social media.  Look first to understand rather than to sell. Look at how people learn rather than tell them what to buy. Look at what people think and how they value information before you show them your products and services. Do these 7 steps in social media marketing and you will learn what works before entering the online social media world.   

Social Media Marketing

You never sell and then market. Marketing is about identifying and targeting the right prospects who you then move at their pace towards your products and services. Once the customer moves towards you then you can market to them until they are ready to be sold to. By marketing effectively first you can then sell efficiently to customers. So market yourself online first and then sell to buyers really to buy.  

I hope that helps you think about how to deploy a social media strategy and not try to sell at first connection. If you would like to learn more about social media then click through my blog posts to see more: http://cowdenconsulting.blogspot.co.uk/

Learn more at www.richardgourlay.com

Regards

Richard

Richard Gourlay provide social media marketing, for clicks and bricks, SaaS and traditional business models, supporting them develop their growth and development.