How To Structure Your Strategy Document
strategy hour 2025 is moving ahead as we delve into the pillars of strategy, the structure of a strategy document, and the first exercise on writing a SMART business objective.
This week’s strategy hour was interesting because we had to fit a lot of topics into one. We talked about the fundamental goal of strategy for a business, what strategists do, the 4 pillars of strategy, how to find winners for your business, campaigns, thinking about market share in binary scope and an example of Roger Martin’s run-through from aspiration, where to play to capabilities to develop for your business.
Someone raised a question about comms crises and what you should do with your marketing spend in a negative sentiment environment, and we look at the first step in a crisis.
ultimately ended with how to write business goals and exercise on this topic, because for strategy, while there are two POVs — business and consumer — the most important for the class right now is seeing and being able to articulate their business POVs.
But for this article, we will discuss the key focus, ‘HOW TO STRUCTURE A STRATEGY DOCUMENT.’
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The key output, the deliverable that shows your work, is not in your head, even though we keep hammering the point that strategy is how you think through for winners.
The deliverable is the strategy document you’re delivering to the client/supervisor, from the creative brief to the strategy document. A document that outlines the course of action your ‘strategic thinking’ has led to based on your rigorous scanning and research of all available information, input, and factors.
This strategy document requires a structure, and it can be overwhelming when you don’t know where or how to kickstart your document development process, because sometimes, not being there yet is better than nothing to show for it. Practice starts from doing, and to do, you must get clarity on what you want to do.
“Strategy is your words,” Mark Pollard said, simply because strategy is largely communication, and the most well-structured thought in a very busy and no-spare-time environment wins. This is why knowing how to structure your document is ultimately a strategy in itself.
In this LinkedIn post, Alex Smith of No-Bullshxt Strategy writes about the mistakes of strategy, highlighting why strategy should understand the need to get buying and communicating is the basis of diplomacy.
For strategy hour, the hands-on classes are not public or made available via YouTube. However, we leveraged my good boss’s deck (Kalu Arunsi) and training material to run through the structures of a strategy document, and you can find both documents via this link: STRUCTURE A STRATEGY DOCUMENT.
cheers 🥳
This week I’m reading Digital City v Analog City, a couple of research papers on Consumer retention and loyalty, and a public paper on media buying from Cannes Award: The Extraordinary Cost of Dull.
