The new strategist?
One of the questions I get asked every now and then is, “what are the skills required for strategy at Zeus Jones?”
Typically I mumble something completely incoherent but it struck me this morning that there is a fairly easy answer. In a couple of the classes I taught at the Miami Ad School, I proposed that there are a number of different strategic disciplines that a good strategist needs to understand:
1. Business strategy: the dynamics of various industries and categories. How money is, or could be made. Where the value is, and the various business models that exist.
2. Brand strategy: branding models and theory. I distinguish here between old brand strategy (standing for one thing) and new brand strategy (building a more complex identity). In my opinion John Grant (very literally) wrote the book on this.
3. Communications strategy: the models by which a message can be transmitted and “received” by a “consumer.” The various methods and means of evaluating whether what we want to happen actually did and the study of various forms of media.
Personally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, I was always bothered by communications strategy. During most of my career as a planner, communications strategy both ate up most of my time while also generating the lion’s share of grief. It was also the area that tended to inspire the most boneheaded and ludicrous theories about how communications work as well as also being the breeding ground for a never-ending supply of charlatans willing to come in and “test” our communications in one (more horrific than the next) way or other.
I never felt on solid ground debating communications strategy because it always devolved into a completely subjective debate. No surprise really considering that even academia doesn’t agree on how communication actually works. Yet because I was expressly in the business of creating communications, this area of strategy clouded the others. Because communications strategy provided the measurement tools for everything we did, it eclipsed the other disciplines in importance and affect.
Without question, the single biggest difference between the work we do at Zeus Jones and the work that we did previously is that we no longer think of it as communications. We don’t promise a communications effect to our clients (nor do they ask for one) and we aren’t held to overly-deterministic and artificial models for creating our work.
So, as the chart above indicates, I’d replace communications strategy with a new #3:
3. Interaction strategy: understanding the form and structure of interactions, the pragmatics of interactions, understanding human/computer interaction and usability.
This also happens to be an area of strategy that some of my partners know a lot more about than I do which has delivered the double bonus of replacing the most tedious part of my job with one of the most interesting.