Business Strategy is Dead!

In the last 10 years, businesses have gone from strategy overload to no strategy at all. Of course I'm generalizing, but the trend remains. I'm referring to everything from marketing communications down to sales. It just seems dead and I blame it, at least in part, to the growth of the world wide web. When I was in advertising creating marketing communications strategy for the likes of Kraft and Lipton Foods, we'd work with these very bright, young individuals with graduate degrees who embraced a very analytical, by-the-numbers approach to strategic planning. It could take a year or more to agree on a strategy that was prepared with hundreds of hours of research and analysis. And then spend many more months agonizing over the execution and tactics to support the strategy. It was painfully slow. In the meantime, the dotcom boom put everything into overdrive. As opposed to thoughtfully making strategic planning decisions, there was no strategy at all. Spend and extend at all costs! Build it and it will come! It was like running a long distance race and suddenly you see everyone take a shortcut and you're all alone running the course. It was an eerie feeling. It seemed like the world had changed in an instant. The "Web specialists" that marketers and advertisers had hired to manage the online activity soon had equal or greater power, but lacked the strategic knowledge. And the old-school strategic thinkers (that were now being viewed as dinosaurs) began to feel the pressure to make quicker decisions and advance communications and sales strategies more rapidly. Strategic planning went from "too slow" to "too quick/none at all". Strategic planning digressed into a series of tactical assaults.

Today, there seems to be an overload of "specialists" and "marketing strategy" is a bankrupt word. I'm not suggesting a specialists is a bad thing, but a balance is in order. The Web is not special anymore; it's just another medium for extending marketing communications strategies. Today, marketing managers need to be as fluent in Web development, analysis, content management and application design as they once were in traditional media planning and strategic development. And they need to be in touch with what's happening on the Web. You don't have to look far to understand what I'm saying is true. Many of us experience a large gap between a marketing message presented on television and what we experience on the customer service or sales level. And the riff manifests itself in many other ways too.

I'm not suggesting we go back to "analysis paralysis" but strategies need be separated from tactics and organizations need to re-examine the skill requirements and structure of their marketing departments. Seek individuals who can provide more synergy (now there's a bankrupt word!) between marketing, technology, business units and sales. No one said it would be easy.