Writing is an essential tool for strategy. Not only because you can communicate your thoughts to others, but also because writing is an iterative process that can help you sharpen your ideas.
In this post, we are going to look at the elements of effective strategic writing.
Defining Strategy:
To start, I need to define what I mean by strategy. Over the course of my career, I have heard many definitions of ‘strategy.’
Some people think of goals or objectives as strategy. This is a narrow view that focuses on the outcomes rather than the activities that lead up to them. Others think of plans or tactics. This is also a narrow view, but those people focus more on operational activities rather than the deliberate choices that result in those activities.
The best definition of strategy I have come across is from consultant and Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter. In his piece “What is Strategy?”, Porter writes that strategy is about choosing a unique set of activities that differentiates a company from its peer, which creates a sustainable competitive advantage.
So clear strategy is about making choices to create a unique value for the customer.
Strategic writing, therefore, is about articulating those sets of choices.
There are a lot of frameworks and formats that can help guide writers to make these choices – Porter’s Five Forces Analysis and the Amazon 6-page narrative document, to name two – but I want to talk about the content rather than the structure.
To be effective, strategic writing must be explicit, relational, and concrete.
Explicit:
When you are developing a strategy, you need to be explicit about which consumer problem you’re trying to solve, what value you can uniquely offer, and how you will do so.
Roger Martin, former Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, writes that strategy is “an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.”
While it is important to state what you are doing, you also need to be as clear about what you are not doing.
Strategy requires trade-offs. You cannot be all things to all people.
We intuitively know this. A bank cannot also be a Greek restaurant. And a pet food company cannot also make study materials for standardized tests. Those each require different sets of capabilities, expertise, distribution, licensing, etc.
It is more challenging when it comes to smaller choices. For instance, a mobile app designed for teenagers is different than one designed for senior citizens. These choices ultimately matter, though, because they lead to different outcomes.
When you fail to be explicit about who your target is and who it is not, as well as how you are going to compete in one way and not another, you risk confusion for both consumers and employees.
One of the principles of good writing is clarity. Clarity around these choices provides a framework for your customers and your employees.
Think about Southwest. Because of Southwest’s low-cost, short-haul, point-to-point servicing strategy, it is clear what Southwest will and will not do. Consumers know they won’t get an in-flight meal, but they do know they will get cheaper tickets. Moreover, employees know that Southwest isn’t going to partner with Heathrow Airport.
As you write out your strategy, focus on how you can be unambiguous in your choices.
Try this exercise:
Fill in the blank.
My company does/makes (blank) for (X Customer) and not (Y Customer).
Focus on specificity here and unlock what this is distinct about X Customer vs Y Customer.
Relational:
Let’s underscore one key phrase in Martin’s definition of strategy: “[positioning] the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.”
In other words, strategy answers two relational questions:
Whom are we creating value for (how do we relate to consumers)?
And how are we creating more value than our competitors (how do we relate to our competitors)?
Strategic writing is always in dialogue with your consumers, yes, and also your competitors. Engage their ideas.
Why focus on your competitors? Two reasons: first, your consumers are aware of their choices or can easily find out their choices; second, strategy is about the choices you make that offer a differentiated value relative to those other choices that consumers face.
In highly competitive space, it’s not enough to just be another item on the shelf. You need to explain why customers should pick your product and how it will benefit them more than picking product X.
Strategic writing must recognize this and respond. To do so, you must understand what your competition is offering.
Your competitor also has valuable strengths for the same consumers. It would be insulting to assume that your competitor has complete disregard for consumers and is just blindly offering a product, hoping it will stick. Moreover, it is insulting to the customer to assume that the only reason they like brand X is because it’s popular and they’re just following the crowd.
When evaluating your competitors, key questions to ask yourself is:
Who, specifically, is their target consumer?
What problem are they trying to solve for this consumer?
What about this product appeals to the customer?
Does their product fully address this problem? Why or why not?
What advantages (technology, partnerships, distribution, scale) do your peets have that allow them to build this product?
Force yourself to outline the specific choices your peers are making to position themselves in the market.
Try this exercise:
Look at one of your competitor’s press releases and find out what they recently launched. Then write a few sentences explaining what you think their rationale is.
Concrete:
Specificity is one of the hardest parts of writing.
Because we are pressed for time, we default to vague clichés and jargon. Our sentences become longer and our ideas become flabby.
This is especially true for PowerPoint presentations. Because it is hard to read paragraphs on a slide, we want to be “high-level” and if we need to add details, we can “speak to it” during the presentation.
What happens, though, is that decks travel further than our words. People forget what they heard in the meeting and when they come back to the slides, they are left with our abstract ideas.
It is therefore important that writing is concrete — not only to communicate clearly, but also to make your thoughts durable.
But this takes time, so we tend to opt for business-y expressions that signal an idea without providing a concrete one. “Optimizing channels” or “double click into” or “low hanging fruit” are ready-made phrases that are convenient, but they often stand in for the true idea. To the reader, they convey something, but the writer feels like she has done her job.
The purpose of writing, though, is to clearly communicate. And in this instance the audience has only a shadow of an idea of what the writer is talking about.
In an essay on ‘modern’ English, George Orwell notices that our tendency is to back away from concreteness.
To illustrate his point, he translated a famous section from Ecclesiastes into modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This fuzzy sentence could be taken out of an executive summary of a deck from every company you have ever worked at.
Notice the difference between that and the original text:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Orwell replaces two common ideas of “time and chance” with the “element of the unpredictable.” This ambiguous phrase can mean a lot of things, so we’re not certain what the writer means. Even the subject (“I”) disappears, and we are left thinking, “wait, who is making these claims?”
When we write in abstractions, we drain our thoughts of their meaning. Writing specifics also forces us to make concrete choices.
We should aim to provide as much detail as possible. This creates less confusion for your audience and, ultimately, your customers.
Try this exercise:
Re-write these vague statements into detailed points.
Customers showed satisfaction when utilizing our product’s features.
Industry reports show luxury travelers are interested in experiences that are elevated.
Thanks for reading.
Stephen
What is the most challenging part about your writing? Do you find it harder to be relational, explicit, or concrete? Let me know in the comments.