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Last week we delved into our ‘how to win’. This provides a great segue into how we align Brand & Channel Strategy.

The roles and challenges we identified for each brand & channel in Portfolio Strategy need to have a strategy built to support each of them. We want to identify specific consumer, shopper and customer behaviors we need to change as part of these strategies and identify how we can best drive these changes (our Strategic Tasks). But this has to be done in a way that ensures all the elements of the portfolio are still working together.

There is a risk brand & sales teams get caught up in developing their strategies independent of the rest of the organization. The sequences of choices and questions in Brand & Channel Strategy helps prevent this by encouraging interaction across the strategy development process to ensure we deliver strong assets that work together to achieve our collective goals.

Creating Strategies that build impact overtime

It takes time to change behaviors. Sometimes we need persistent activity in the market place, building and reinforcing impact sometimes over multiple years. This is why we need to develop the brand & channel strategies with at least a three-year time horizon. The most immediate behavior changes (those we want to make it happen over the next 12-18 months) we will hand off to the Integrated Activity Plan.

Profitable Revenue & Costs:

Managing the budget and ensuring we get the expected return on our efforts across multiple brands and channels is a critical challenge every management team must face. We cannot do everything for every brand in every channel. We need to make hard choices that smartly invest our resources in those assets and activities that will drive the highest return for our business. At the end of Brand & Channel Strategy we will have a three-year profitable revenue plan estimating the cost and the revenue potential of our strategies. Senior management can challenge and test these figures with each team and collectively ensure we are able to achieve our commercial goals

How do we use the outputs of Brand & Channel Strategy?

The Goals, Objectives and Strategic Tasks output (the GOST) captures the key business choices we make in Brand & Channel Strategy in a single integrated picture. Too often business leaders are tasked with signing off on strategies that do not clearly demonstrate the rationale for the strategic choices made. The GOST is a powerful integrating output that helps business leaders test the robustness and internal consistency of each individual strategy. They can assess are the goals for the brand are appropriate given its role in the Portfolio Strategy? They can judge are we asking too much of the brand or channel or too little? The business leadership can also judge the quality of thinking behind which behaviors will be changed and how?