Strategy playbook
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The document outlines a strategy for creative agencies to pursue long-term, future-facing growth. It proposes that strategy can spur growth by focusing on three main tasks: 1) influencing the scale and scope of an agency's offerings and recognizing new growth opportunities, 2) helping emerging digital markets grow and scale, and 3) leading digital market innovation and influencing industry conversations. Pursuing these three strategic focuses through service, product/service innovation, and infrastructure integration could systemically advance an agency's long-term growth in a sustainable way without diluting its unique culture.
Strategy playbook
- 1. STRATEGY PLAYBOOK Designing Responsive Strategy for Creative Agencies 1
- 2. Create a systemic, proactive and continuous growth that builds on the agency’s existing strengths without diluting its unique culture. THE CHALLENGE. 2
- 3. New Offerings Existing Offerings Existing Clients New Clients Making legacy business more valuable (Integrated campaigns, Digital products, Digital systems) Adding new services (Labs, Studios, Interactive Production, Digital product development, Social Media, Digital strategy, Digital media planning)) Expanding into new categories and industry verticals ? AGENCIES RESPOND TO THIS CHALLENGE BY: 3
- 4. Can agencies become value brokers in the digital world? THEY ARE SLOWER TO TACKLE A LONG-TERM, FUTURE- FACING GROWTH OPPORTUNITY: New Offerings Existing Offerings Existing Clients New Clients Making legacy business more valuable (Integrated campaigns, Digital products, Digital systems) Adding new services (Labs, Studios, Interactive Production, Digital product development, Social Media, Digital strategy, Digital media planning)) Expanding into new categories and industry verticals 4
- 5. THE ROLE OF STRATEGY IN THE LONG-TERM, FUTURE-FACING GROWTH 5
- 6. BY ITS VERY NATURE, STRATEGY IS WELL POSITIONED TO HELP CONSUMER BRAND BUSINESS MARKET • It clarifies the problem • Formulates the hypothesis about the solution and selects a method to test it • Sets clear and constant objectives • Defines resources needed to meet them • Combines convergent and divergent thinking, direction and inspiration • Human-centered, sustainable, holistic • Designs the plan for execution • Requires internal and external collaboration • Defines how success will be measured 6
- 7. • Surveys, focus groups and secondary-research audience insights • Brand Models • Trend mapping • Competitive overviews • Summary of best practices • Comms planning and Engagement Planning • Data and Analytics • As a set-up for creative concepts BUT THE WAY AGENCIES ARE CURRENTLY USING STRATEGY IS LIMITED: 7
- 8. • Create a hub for primary, design thinking-driven consumer insights, brand audits, and business analysis. Develop problem-solving briefs and establish a digital-first strategic process. Don’t just set the stage for the creative, but inspire it to become even better. THIS IS HOW THEY CAN BE USING IT: 8
- 9. • Create a hub for primary, design thinking-driven consumer insights, brand audits, and business analysis. Develop problem-solving briefs and establish a digital-first strategic process. Don’t just set the stage for the creative, but inspire it to become even better. • Explore new revenue models and come up with new commerce opportunities for brands. Detect digital growth opportunities on an agency level. THIS IS HOW THEY CAN BE USING IT: 9
- 10. • Create a hub for primary, design thinking-driven consumer insights, brand audits, and business analysis. Develop problem-solving briefs and establish a digital-first strategic process. Don’t just set the stage for the creative, but inspire it to become even better. • Explore new revenue models and come up with new commerce opportunities for brands. Detect digital growth opportunities on an agency level. • Nurture relationship with innovators who are disrupting business. Connect the agency with the wider digital ecosystem. THIS IS HOW THEY CAN BE USING IT: 10
- 11. • Create a hub for primary, design thinking-driven consumer insights, brand audits, and business analysis. Develop problem-solving briefs and establish a digital-first strategic process. Don’t just set the stage for the creative, but inspire it to become even better. • Explore new revenue models and come up with new commerce opportunities for brands. Detect digital growth opportunities on an agency level. • Nurture relationship with innovators who are disrupting business. Connect the agency with the wider digital ecosystem. • Create thought leadership content (articles, POVs, reports, presentations) to be used in agency marketing and sold to clients. THIS IS HOW THEY CAN BE USING IT: 11
- 12. • Create a hub for primary, design thinking-driven consumer insights, brand audits, and business analysis. Develop problem-solving briefs and establish a digital-first strategic process. Don’t just set the stage for the creative, but inspire it to become even better. • Explore new revenue models and come up with new commerce opportunities for brands. Detect digital growth opportunities on an agency level. • Nurture relationship with innovators who are disrupting business. Connect the agency with the wider digital ecosystem. • Create thought leadership content (articles, POVs, reports, presentations) to be used in agency marketing and sold to clients. • Become a new revenue stream for the agency as a stand-alone service that is pitched to clients separately from creative development. Expand agency offerings to include brand books, social media playbooks, brand strategy, strategic platform development, and content strategy. THIS IS HOW THEY CAN BE USING IT: 12
- 13. INSPIREINNOVATE CONNECT LEAD MORE SPECIFICALLY, STRATEGY CAN SPUR GROWTH BY FOCUSING ON THE FOLLOWING TASKS: 13
- 14. 14 Innovation of consumer experience and commerce business models
- 15. Innovate Design and develop innovative experiences and commerce business models. Scout digital markets to come up with new business & revenue ideas. At best, you’d create money that didn’t exist before you came up with the idea (AirBnB and Uber have also done it.) 15
- 16. First step is to ask what business you are in. Stop defining yourself as an agency. You are not only about creative ideas, campaigns, media plans, design or production. You are about business solutions, great experiences, sustainable systems, content and distribution. You are an advisor, broker and curator. When you redefine yourself like this, the range of solutions you can come up with expands. The range of problems you can solve and clients you can serve expands, too. 16
- 17. Find new ways to solve problems: • How might we create positive acquisition utility by innovating with a flexible check-in process? • How might we make the existing brand offerings more valuable through creating context for their consumption, coming up with meaningful extensions or adding utility? • How might we turn utility into ads? How might we introduce fun, small solutions into our media plans? • How might we utilize sharing economy to deliver value to our brands? • How might we translate our brands’ value chain into customer experience flow? 17
- 18. 18 DIGITAL COMMERCE MARKETS Retail is the biggest digital commerce market, but it’s not the only one. There is a number of possible digital revenue streams.
- 19. 19 Connect: Create a marketplace for ideas, capital and collaboration
- 20. Connect Connect different dots to create something new. Use digital infrastructure to bundle your clients’ offerings with innovative, disruptive solutions. By doing so, create a new revenue source for brands. 20
- 21. Connect Create meaningful collaborations between brands. Know what behavior you need to affect to achieve desired business results for your clients. This will lead you to the right complimentary partners. 21
- 22. Connect Help those who disrupt business. Connect brands with innovators: Mix community and commerce to increase products’ reach. Use collaborative consumption to increase brand affinity. Employ redistribution markets to extend the product lifecycle. 22
- 23. Connect Turn into a value broker. There is currently a big demand for platforms that allow consumers to invest in the products, people and companies they know and love. These platforms are multi-sided: they serve entrepreneurs, advisors and investors. The main benefit in this ecosystem is that whoever builds a platform, owns it. 23
- 24. Connect Mix marketing and utility. Ads don’t have to come in the form of banners. They can also be digital products. Integrate your love for digital products with your extensive distribution and marketing infrastructure. 24
- 25. 25 Lead the industry conversation through insights, tools and direction
- 26. Lead Expose the freshest people, solutions and ideas of our time. Strategy’s leadership task is to influence, shape and direct industry conversations. In order to become a think-thank, strategy needs to keep close to those who are disrupting business. It also needs to be able to communicate its insights in simple and clear way, to multiple audiences. 26
- 27. CRAFT THINK FIND Use insights into the latest trends in technology & behavior to build products and tools that respond to clients’ and customers’ challenges. Curate articles, interviews, expert opinions and data that talk about new mechanisms of creating value. Become a go-to resource for digital markets. Put selected thinkers, doers and writers on the map and explore their ideas on the future of commerce, brands, technology and business. 27
- 28. 28 Use inspiration tools to make the creative better
- 29. Inspire Use the principles of design thinking to enrich the creative process. The aim of great strategy is to liberate great creativity (and not to make planners famous). The fastest route to inspiration is a human- centric, problem- solving approach that adds value to people’s lives. It combines six techniques: - Customer Insights - Ideation - Prototyping - Storytelling - Scenarios 29
- 30. 30
- 31. Start strategy with humans. It increases the likelihood of developing a breakthrough idea and finding a receptive market by connecting this ideas to existing behaviors. Make sure that our value proposition solves real customer problems. Make sure that customers are willing to pay for it. Know how they’d like to be reached. The empathy map, Digital ethnography, ethnography, language-based insights, expert Interviews, Online user testing, Online surveys, Segmentation handbooks, Insight out, Individual interviews, Group interviews, In-context immersion, Observation.. Consumer Insights Why. What. How. 31
- 32. Come up with a large number of ideas, hypotheses or possible solutions. It gets creative minds thinking and increases likelihood of them coming up with a breakthrough idea. Ideation process has two parts: generation where volume matters and synthesis where ideas are narrowed down to a small number of viable options. Come up with hypotheses, Define opportunities, Create solutions, Make sense of consumer insights Ideation How. What. Why. 32
- 33. Prototyping & Storytelling Create low-investment, low-cost ways of trying out team’s ideas in a real world context and serving as a springboards for the next round of ideas. Tell a story about which challenges a customer is facing and which job they want to get done. Illustrate how team’s ideas create value for customers and create value for them. This is a clear way to introduce a solution and describing how it fits into customers’ life. Storyboards, Visual storytelling. How. What. Why. 33
- 34. Scenarios Make customer insights tangible and inform the design development process through specific and detailed design context. Capture how people travel through a product, service or brand experience in time and what the most meaningful points are. Clarify where the customer and the service or brand interact and what are the points of opportunity to deliver value. How. Experience journey maps, Experience blueprint, Customer journeys, Future scenarios How. What. Why. 34
- 35. SUMMARY: THE ROLE OF STRATEGY IN THE LONG- TERM, FUTURE-FACING AGENCY GROWTH Influence scale and scope of an agency’s offerings & recognize growth opportunities. Help emerging digital markets grow and scale. Lead digital market innovation and influence industry conversations. 1/3 1/3 1/3 Service Product & service innovation Infrastructure Systemic integration of three core lines of business: service, product innovation and infrastructure. 35