[Podcast] Simplifying Strategy with Mark Pollard

Mark Pollard, founder of Mighty Jungle and host of Sweathead, shares his unique perspective on simplifying strategy in this insightful episode. Reflecting on his journey from creative to strategist, Mark explains his approach to strategy, highlighting the pivotal role of storytelling and empathy in shaping effective brand narratives.

We explore the delicate balance between creativity and analytical thinking, with Mark providing real-world examples of strategies that drive impactful results. He underscores the importance of simplicity in strategy, offering practical guidance on how to create clear, actionable brand strategies through his 4 Point Framework.

Mark also dives into the biggest challenges facing strategists today, offering advice on avoiding common pitfalls and staying ahead in a rapidly evolving industry.

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Transcripts (Auto-Generated)

Hello and welcome to JUST Branding. Today we’re thrilled to be joined by Mark Pollard, a name that is synonymous with modern strategy and creative thinking. Mark is the CEO of Mighty Jungle and the founder of Sweathead, which is a global community and training platform with over 18,000 strategists and a podcast that’s been streamed over 1.3 million times.

Before becoming a leader in the strategy world, Mark started his career in Australia’s hip hop scene, founding the country’s first full color hip hop magazine, Stealth, while hosting a radio show. Mark has since built a reputation for simplifying complex ideas, working with major brands like The Economist, Mozilla and McCann. He’s not only a strategist, but also a writer, speaker and teacher, and his philosophy centers around the power of words, creativity and empathy to shape powerful brand strategies.

Today, we’re going to dive into the art of simplifying strategy and how he helps brands cut through the noise in today’s fast paced world. So welcome to the show, Mark.

Yes, hi Adlai. How are you?

Hey, you’re right. All right. Another Aussie in the house.

Mark.

Oh, man. I’m outnumbered, guys. I’m outnumbered.

I’ll start with where it sort of ended, which is I’ve managed to find a way to build a business model around my new Rossis and my personality traits that don’t fit into regular living in the regular world. So let’s start at the end. But it traverses things like a hip hop magazine, hip hop radio show, did a lot of that stuff for a decade, wrote for most of the music press in Australia, also Vice in Canada before it was global, about 70 magazines.

And I guess that was my main thing. And sort of on the side, although on the side could have also mentioned during the day, I was working in agencies. So first 8 to 10 years, mostly focused on digital projects, user experience, information architecture.

First project was I led content strategy when I was 20 for Levi’s. They were one of the first brands, probably in Australia, actually do quote unquote content. And then when I was 28, got a job where I was doing 50% digital strategy, 50% what’s called account planning.

These days just strategy in advertising. And I was working at Leo Burnett in Sydney and was hired by a guy that a lot of Australians would know because he’s on the Gruen transfer. His name is Todd Sampson, but he gave me my first essentially full-time strategy role.

When there weren’t that many strategy roles in the country at that time, moved to New York 13 years ago, worked for four or five. Four, why didn’t I do four or five? I worked for four agencies.

I liked one of them, didn’t like most of them. And so I decided to set up my own thing. And I’ve been training strategy, writing about it, teaching it ever since eight years now.

By the very career there, very diverse. UX UI as well, so I didn’t know that. Okay, cool.

So how did you transition from creative, which you like doing UX UI to a strategic role?

Well, I think that user experience is creative, but I actually see it as a strategic role. So in my dream agency, which I was never able to create and I never tried to set up my own one, I would have anybody that focuses on what people do in the strategy department. So that would include user experience, that would include research and insights, that would include account planning, quantitative, qualitative research, that would all be together because it’s essentially just trying to understand people’s behavior.

UXI wasn’t a thing until recently, and there was a little flirtation with customer service design as well where all the user experience people wanted to be taken more seriously, so they started to call themselves customer service designers. Then there was a fight in larger agencies that I was around, where chief creative officers and senior creative people wanted more people in their departments from different backgrounds to secure their empires, but most of them didn’t get user experience, let alone designing for user experience. For me, user experience and understanding search behavior, or even understanding what links people are clicking on, email blasts in the 1990s, was really interesting.

I love the Internet because it was instant, there were no gatekeepers. If you wanted to put something into the world, you could, if you wanted to reach out to people, you could. So that’s really what got me into it.

Then I guess the strategy role became a little bit more prominent when I was in my 20s. In Sydney, I don’t think there would have been more than 100 strategists, I’d say a lot fewer than 100. I just realized that, well, first of all, at that time also, there weren’t many full-time UX or UXI or UI roles at all, right?

I was a producer, but 60 to 70% of my day, including midnight on Saturday night, I’m like 250 second page into a functional specification for an Audi online training program. So the producer did a lot more stuff than they tend to do now. We’re often their own amazing producers, but also there’s a lot of paper pushing going on right now, sort of masquerading as a career.

But these things were different back when I was coming up, and I just decided that I wanted to do full-time strategy. It was my favorite part of the job and was able to get a couple of offers, including one at the Obernet, which I took.

Okay. So what’s your definition of strategy again? Everyone has their own version of it.

Yeah. I mean, so I wrote a book called Strategy as Your Words, and I talk about how strategy to me, in a very general, very secular way, is an informed opinion about how to win. You need information.

If you only have information, you’re reporting, which is fine, but don’t call it strategy. But you also need opinion and you need a strong argument. I think that’s the case whether you’re designing with strategy in mind, doing UX or doing what I have grown up doing, account planning, you need a strong argument as well.

And typically, it’s about increasing your chances to succeed. So that’s my secular definition of the word.

Has your view on strategy changed over the years?

Well, words have become more central. I mean, I was a writer, I’m infatuated with words, I wrote poetry, bad rap growing up, tried to learn different languages, I’m trying to learn Spanish now. So I see everything definitely through the lens of words.

And I think in your introduction, you’re right that I do see critical thinking and creativity necessarily needing to come out of people’s mouths or pens or keyboards at some point through words. And at the same time, one of the things that gets in the way of most people and what they call strategy is just shit words, right? So I would say that it’s not a simplistic point of view, but I think it’s the most absolute truth that I hover around.

Well, you often talk about simplifying complex ideas. What kind of led to that philosophy?

Probably moving to the US and not understanding how to succeed in corporate America while having grown up in a very direct culture. Australians apparently like the Dutch, we don’t like hierarchy, we’re relatively direct. And we pay a price for that when we move countries.

I know Aussies will sometimes go to the UK or Japan or China, basically anywhere Aussies will go. But I think what confuses the most is when they go to the UK and the US and then they start to learn that maybe they shouldn’t start meetings with jokes because their jokes won’t work, no one will laugh. Or maybe they should just hold on to their opinion a little bit longer than they think they need to.

And so I think I just spent four or five years trying to work out how to do good work in New York City. Super expensive, very volatile, no job safety. If you lose a job, they can basically walk you out the door that day.

And I was just confused in meetings. And so I think if I didn’t move to the US., I wouldn’t have focused on words that much.

I would have written a maybe shorter, more practical book on planning, which might not have been super interesting. But my confusion and culture shock in the US was probably what drove me to focus on words so much.

It’s interesting you say that about New York. I lived there for about five years as well. I was not allowed to do presentations because no one could understand me.

And the humor thing did not.

I still can’t understand.

I’m working on it.

But did they not understand you because of the accent or because of…

Yeah, I had to totally change my tone and the speed and everything. So we just put it out there.

Yeah, the humor doesn’t work. Yeah, no, I get it. It’s totally fine.

We’ll roast Jacob more and more and more. Matt, every question he asks me, Matt, you just roast Jacob.

That’s pretty much our podcast anyway.

That’s why we’re famous. But I had a follow-up question because this is a serious podcast, just putting all the jokes to one side.

I’ll be the judge of that.

You will, yeah. So before we go into this, because it’s really interesting that you mentioned that good strategy in effect focuses in on the words, because that’s how we think. We think in words.

I suppose you could argue we think in vision as well. But really, it’s good thinking, isn’t it? When you get to the nuts and bolts of it, surely, because to select the right words, you have to have had those good strategic concepts to be able to put forward and communicate powerfully in words.

So perhaps we circle around that. What is strategy to you and therefore, what is good strategy? You mentioned about winning.

So what do we mean by that and how do you frame that?

Yeah. So there’s also this categorization that I’ve come across. I don’t know who coined it, if anybody’s actually coined it about how ideas emerge.

And we could start with dreams. We’re just going to start with dreams, where we have these dreams, we’re not sure what they really mean, and then there’s art and feelings, and then eventually words at some point. But you could probably understand an idea without words, but through those other things.

But eventually, you’re going to find the words to say it. So as far as what strategy is, we kind of need to situate strategy within a topic, okay? Because you jump on LinkedIn, and there’s all these people who have done Masters of Marketing or MBAs.

They hate that any of us use the word strategy. So in advertising, if I’m having a conversation with someone in advertising, we say, what’s the strategy? That question is not going to mean the same thing everywhere.

But for me, what it means is, we’re trying to find an organizing idea in a piece of communication that will also come to life in other channels in slightly different ways. So if you think about Coca-Cola, they’ve talked about joy a lot. If you think about a lot of the advertising in Australia about drunk driving or about violence in the home and things like that, when you say, what’s the strategy?

They might say, for example, with one particular campaign that if a parent’s drinking a lot at home, the kids are likely to kind of inhale that inheritance. So there’s like an organizing idea, which you could explain in a word or at least within a sentence. And then every other piece of communication and every other way the brand behaves would honor that idea.

So that makes an awful lot of sense in terms of an organizing idea. But you also mentioned about winning. So what did you mean by winning?

Is it the intent behind the brand, the concept that will help the brand further its cause? Is that what we’re talking about?

Yeah, to be reductive, typically with strategy, you’re going to have a goal to achieve. Otherwise, what are you doing? You don’t need to do any strategy.

Just chill, take some time off, go do some deadlifts, some squats, get a few days in, totally cool. But you’re going to need a goal. And the goal is typically going to be about you winning, literally, figuratively, whatever you’re trying to win at.

You’re going to need an audience. Typically, I’m going to look for a problem that we’re trying to solve, largely about how the audience perceives the brand. You get to a strategy, which is an organizing idea, and then you have maybe three to five key buckets of tactics, probably three buckets of tactics, and that is basically your operating system.

And now you can break this down into how people are ideas and how people are strategies. I talk a lot about an Italian football player called Andrea Piero. His whole thing was about not running.

He made the ball run. So you can say that that’s his strategy, right? His goal was to win and to be a successful player to earn money, right?

But if his strategy is about Perlo not running, but making the ball run, his tactics bring that to life. So for example, he would play balls from very deep positions, very long balls from deep positions. He would shoot from a long way away.

He would not do mindless dribbling. He would not do mindless running. So an organizing idea and a strategy helps you work out what to do, but it also most importantly helps you what to say no to.

Well, this kind of taps into storytelling and empathy, right? Which you often talk about as being like central to an effective strategy. So like, why do you think these things are so important for building brands?

Well, you remember stories. So when you look at what makes advertising effectiveness and therefore what makes brands effective or branding effective, it’s getting the distinctive brand assets into the long-term memory, so that when someone’s thinking about buying from the category that your product is in, they might think of you, right? And you do that by triggering an emotional reaction.

And so it helps to feel empathy for people so that you can communicate to them about what’s deep and meaningful to them, but also to be a little bit artistically, creatively sensitive, because beautiful music can also trigger an emotional reaction, as much as a joke or as much as a poetic insight about what it means to be alive, right? So you have different levers or levers. I don’t even know how to say that anymore, but different levers to pull.

And it’s largely about the story helping the brand travel into the memory, because information will travel along with that story, but not as much as the feelings connected to the story. They’re more powerful.

So with that in mind, like, how do you see creativity tying in with that and, like, strategy as a whole? Like, how do we balance being creative but keeping things simple and actionable at the same time?

Okay. So when it comes to the kind of strategy that I talk about, I see that kind of strategy as creative work, but don’t see it as creative department work. However, if someone is a copywriter or art director and designer and they want to do strategy, that’s separate.

Totally. You go for it, right? But if you’re working in a traditional advertising structure, as strategic as someone in a creative department might be, and however they might contribute to the strategy, I see the strategist still doing creative work.

They’re just not coming up with advertising ideas or campaign ideas. So I think it starts there. And then as far as being creative and eventually single-minded, it comes down to words.

Like, what can you leave out? You know, with great design, amazing designers who are into minimalism, what can I remove from what I’ve just done? But they’re able to do it in such a profound way that it strikes us as incredible.

And it’s the same with writing. It’s the same with strategy. What can I remove from this?

What can I omit from this to make it more single-minded? Because there’s a ton of research about how in advertising, at least, single-minded messages are much more memorable than the kinds of communications where you’re throwing in like 10 product features and it’s over here. And there’s a person saying something here and another person is like, what is going on?

Right. And so I think the creativity comes in seeing the connections between the product and brand, as well as people’s lives, being single-minded in how you communicate what that connection is. And then you have all the other levers that you can pull, music, art direction, actual art direction, which I think is an increasingly rare skill and so on.

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So, you know, we’re talking about storytelling, creativity and strategy. Are there any like examples that come to mind that like perfectly balance these things?

Why are you looking for a perfect balance of these things, young man?

Well, it’s just we’re talked about those three things, so I was just wanting to see if they all are like, what comes to mind with those three things that, you know, they work well together as like an example.

Strategy, creativity and…

Storytelling.

Storytelling.

Well, there was a campaign out of the UK for Audi a few years ago, which featured clowns and it had beautiful throwback, nostalgic music, famous song. It had beautiful Audi cars driving through streets and then there were clowns on the road and the cars were avoiding them and that was part of Audi’s most effective campaign ever. So I think that’s a pretty good example of craft, storytelling without using words and creativity.

Any other ones? Doesn’t have to have all of those things, but maybe some campaigns that you would like to share.

Well, I mean, you’re probably familiar with a relatively recent Tourism Australia ad that featured the kangaroo and the unicorn, right? That pre-tested really, really well. Matt, you didn’t see it?

I mean, you’re not in the target audience. They dropped it two years ago. I think it was two years ago and that pre-tested really, really well.

And I think it was a very disciplined, pragmatic approach to marketing. I think a lot of Audi’s complained that it wasn’t progressive enough, not a sort of diverse enough display of what Australia is really, really about. But advertising to a foreign audience, they had all of the places that they needed to have.

So that was part of the strategy. What are we going to showcase? So Uluru, food, amazing views.

They took Men at Work, Land Down Under, but a remix of it. So they had an old song that would trigger memories in people. And then they had these two characters.

And again, the research into what makes advertising and branding effective. And again, what makes advertising effective is dialogue is quite powerful for that. Possibly more than monologue, but definitely more than those ads where you see like 10 people saying the same thing.

Like, I like branding, I like branding, I like branding. Like that’s not very effective. And so that to me is an example of pragmatic, creative and strategic marketing that knew its audience and kind of had to communicate to its audience in spite of the Australian audience.

So I think that’s an interesting case study too.

Yeah, it was for the US audience, right? That was who they were targeting?

Yeah, I mean, it’s global, global. So that went out into China. They did some pretty big activations in China from memory, but it was global.

They launched it in New York. They got together the launch, which was quite surreal, being in a room of largely Australians in Brooklyn. But it was a cool night.

Well, I’m curious because you’re an Aussie that’s lived in New York. How did you find the ad?

Weird. I was just back in Australia. Obviously, when you’re on a plane or you’re back in a room full of Australians, it’s weird.

I’m a little bit self-conscious of my accent in some parts of the world. But I think I’ve worked my way through that 13 years in the US. There are some words that I modify.

When I say water, I hate hearing myself say water. They call it water.

Yeah.

Yeah. I knew my name, Mark, the way I pronounce it. No one hears it the first time.

They say it back to me as if it’s some exotic name. I’m like, no, no, Mark, Mark, and we get there. Mark.

Being in the room of Australians, there was like Nick Griner was there. He was the New South Wales premiere for a while. There were all these TV show hosts and it was just weird because I made a decision to not be in Australia.

It’s weird to have been back in a room with Aussies in a way where it was cool. It was a touristic moment for me.

Yeah. It’s a very long ad for people who haven’t seen it. I think it was three minutes maybe just from memory.

It was quite long.

The launch video. Yeah, the launch video was, but they had different versions of it. I think when people are criticizing or discussing advertising online, sometimes they’ll focus on something that’s a minute or three minutes.

That’s probably not the format of the ad or format of the campaign that most people are going to see. It’s just the stuff that sends a ripple through the advertising and marketing industries.

All right. Well, let’s talk about simplification. That’s the title of this episode.

I know you often talk about this, like simplifying strategy. Do you want to walk us through your process for strategy?

I have a variety of techniques that I’ve borrowed, developed, built on. A framework that I tend to use is called the Four Points. It’s something that I developed a few years ago and wrote a book around.

But I’ll just take you through an actual example from the Spanish brand. La Casera, that I worked on a few days ago. It’s a hypothetical example.

If I didn’t have a lot of time, obviously, I need to understand a little bit about the brand and the product. These days, I don’t feel like I need to understand a lot. I think when I was younger, I would have spent a lot of time digging into what the product is, how it works, and that’s valuable work.

But as I get older, I’m really looking for connections and I feel like I do have quite a lot of life experience and strategy experience to draw on. That helps me focus relatively quickly. So I was working on a hypothetical project or a hypothetical strategy with a strategist called Claudia Nunez from Spain the other day.

We were working on this drink called La Cacera, which is basically like sparkling water, I guess. Like sparkling water, it’s an old brand, it’s not as cool anymore, and in Spain, people use it to dilute beer and red wine in summer. But we were talking about how to make it a little bit cooler.

And so where I’ll start, if I don’t have a lot of time, is I just want to list problems. Now, there are lots of different kinds of problem. I would define the word problem when I’m working this way as an obstacle or a barrier that’s in the way of someone buying something or doing something.

Okay, so for this brand, we wrote down things like, it’s what grandparents used to drink. It’s not tasty enough. People don’t know how to drink it.

People don’t know how to serve it. There are other better, newer options. It’s not available in many places.

It’s more for mixing with other drinks. That language is okay. What you will notice is we’re not using any marketing language.

We’re not using language like low awareness, low relevance, low saliency, low preference, low intent, low consideration, all that stuff. That’s not that useful to me these days. I understand if a marketer is getting bonused based on how people respond to surveys and awareness and consideration, etc.

But when we’re doing this work, we’re not going to find thinking through those things very interesting. I’m really looking for what people are saying in research on Reddit and consumer reviews about why they didn’t buy a thing, or maybe why they did buy a thing. Okay.

Step one, this is the problems. Then what we did is we just took one of the problems that we thought was one of the main ones and we did the five whys. We just dug into the problem and it went like this.

People don’t know how to drink La Casera, which seems like a bit of a weird problem, but this is the problem that I heard.

Why?

Grandparents didn’t pass on the knowledge. Why? The kids didn’t want the knowledge.

Why?

The kids wanted to break from the past. Why? Spain’s past was dark.

So that dictatorship and all kinds of problems in Spain for a very, very long time, which we often forget where we see the amazing photos of friends in Spain in summers. So step one, we list the problems. Step two, we dig into the problem.

We ask why, why, why, why, why, why? Now, as we go through this, we might use the last problem. We might continue asking why, but eventually we’re going to grab a problem that to me, I could imagine on the first slide and being a real hook in a presentation.

I need evidence. I need to be able to not prove that this is the problem, but I need evidence to support my argument or our argument. This is the problem we need to solve.

Okay, that’s where it starts. Then from there, I just very quickly wrote up a four points because a couple of things came to mind. The four points itself involves four things, problem, insight, advantage, strategy.

The problem, that’s the obstacle or the barrier in the way of someone from buying something. Insight is an unspoken human truth that sheds new light on the problem. I’ll give you the examples for like a setter in a second.

Advantage is about the brand. That’s essentially asking what’s unique and motivating about the brand to people. Even though there’s a lot of research these days, it talks about how differentiation, as in how you are unique, doesn’t matter as much as a lot of us would talk growing up.

We can talk about that if you want. It’s a rabbit hole and we might not come out of it. Then strategy, what I’m looking for, there’s a strategy statement typically in the form of show that X is Y, where the strategy here is a new way of seeing your brand based on all of that.

The strategy solves the problem by putting the insight and advantage together. Four sentences problem, la casera is from a dark time. We’ve switched from people aren’t drinking it that often to, well, it’s because it’s from a dark time, so we’re trying to solve more of a root cause.

Insight, this is a bit light, but it makes sense. In dark times, it’s the simple things that get you from day to day. Now, I’ve had to argue for that.

I’ve read the book Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, a psychologist who actually spent time in concentration camps, talks about how meaning helps people get from day to day. Advantage, like I said, it was a little bit of light that got Spain through a dark period. So apparently, it was often on everybody’s tables.

It was that common back in the day. So a little bit of light that got Spain through a dark period. We’re riffing on light and dark period.

Not amazing, but it felt interesting, so I kept it. Strategy will show that La Cacera is a little bit of light to get you through dark periods. So regardless of branding and what we could design from this, I could see a campaign, which would be pretty counterintuitive for a big brand like this.

I could see a campaign where we’re trying to get La Cacera into scenarios. Let’s say it’s in a video or in some kind of ad, where people are just having a bit of a struggle. Maybe they’re stuck on their phone for too long, but then on the other side of the phone or on the shelf behind the phone, they’re like, oh, there’s La Cacera.

Maybe they’re going through a breakup, etc. So we just find these little dark periods that are relevant to now and show how La Cacera might play a role in that. So that’s an example of how I’d work if I had to work really quickly.

Okay. Thank you. Matt, did you have any questions before I follow up question?

No, I just think that’s a super smart example. And I think that four-point process that you presented really touches on absolutely all the key things. I think we often people start with strategy and they don’t start with a problem.

But as you say, then what are we doing then? We’ve got to solve something. We’ve got to create value.

We’ve got to be able to communicate that powerfully and in an exciting way. So I think those first two points on the problem and then the human insult, absolutely brilliant to set the scene. And then the advantage when you go into what…

That’s really where you bring the value to light, almost that uniqueness. And let’s not go down that rabbit hole. We’ve been down there a few times with me and Jacob, with some guests in the past.

But yeah, that’s where you basically put a spotlight, it seems to me, on the value. And then the strategy is that kind of organizing idea, which is now where we’re going to hinge everything from. And when you went through that, you can totally see how that could apply to multiple channels throughout a campaign.

So super smart, so great. Yeah, no further questions on the frameworks. I just think it’s brilliant.

Well, let me also say this, it gives you four sentences to set up a presentation as well. So let’s say before you reveal the creative, which could be an advertising idea or branding or whatever you’re presenting, those four sentences give you four fast sections of a presentation because you’d introduce the problem. And then the next slide or next two or three slides, you’re like, here’s the proof, here are the people I spoke to, here’s what they said.

Then we get to the insight. But here’s the thing about blah, blah, blah. And we have a few slides where we sort of show the proof or the argument, the evidence to support the insight.

And so I quite like it. It does center the problem. Although I think you could work with, if you’re working with a brand and as a CEO has a really strong point of view, and they’re really clear on why they’re doing what they’re doing, you can absolutely build a brand without necessarily thinking about the problem that you’re trying to solve through communication or through branding.

But I don’t know, I’m a little bit biased and addicted to what’s like, if there’s no problem, what are we even doing? Not enough sales is not an interesting problem to solve.

No, the problem that you’ve spoken to there is the problem from the consumer’s perspective or like a wide societal problem in a way for that type of brand. I guess if the brand is set up to fix a specific issue, like here in the UK, another brand that comes to mind, and just because it’s on my mind at the moment is Specsavers. Specsavers are, they provide glaciers, spectacles, and highly successful, one of the longest standing campaigns, basically has the catchphrase is, should have gone to Specsavers.

I was trying to think through your framework there. I haven’t obviously worked on it, but just off the top of my head, we’ve got the problem is that people can’t see. Insight is probably because they’re not getting checked enough.

The advantage of Specsavers is they’re really available and they’re everywhere on the high street and so on. And so the strategy is, let’s get people into Specsavers. So should have gone to Specsavers becomes the organizing principle of highlighting, I guess the strategy would be highlighting incidents where sight or hearing in some cases would have been a great thing to have if only the person had gone to Specsavers.

So it pulls it together. That was just, forgive me, but yeah.

I think the strategy that they’re selling there is like regret free.

Yes, a hundred percent.

The hyphenator word, which is crap writing and every fifth strategy probably has like a hyphen with proof or free in it, but whatever. But they’re essentially saying, you won’t regret shopping here, which is interesting. It’s not super specific and unique, even though we’re gonna avoid the rabbit hole of differentiation, but it’s catchy.

And if they build it over a long period of time, it’s gonna get into people’s memories. And because you said that they’ve got high physical availability, they’re everywhere, then, whoop, don’t have to think about it too much. Let me just go somewhere where I think I can get reasonably priced glasses because I just lost mine or sat on mine or whatever it is.

So yeah, I think the main idea there is about like regret free.

Nice. All right. So, you know, once you have this, you know, you use your framework and you come up with a strategy, like is there a point where you validate this or like, what is the next step for turning that into action?

Well, it depends on the kind of company you’re working in and if you have clients. So what I usually do with the four points is I’ll develop five to ten of them. I might write them into a diagram or I’ll just write them on a piece of paper, not in a diagram.

Okay, I’ll do five to ten. I use volume, quantity of output to make sure my ego doesn’t latch on to the first or second one. I want volume to see if I can beat it.

Okay, so start there. Second is what I do is I like to write these things that I call strategy stories. I don’t mean it in a fancy way, but I essentially give myself one page.

It’s usually about 200 words, one page to turn the four points, which are four sentences, into a 200 word argument. I won’t do it for five to ten of them. I’ll usually do it for about three of them.

They read like case studies, but before you’ve done the work, so they’re not case studies, but they have a similar structure. I’m just trying to get clear. Matt hinted at this earlier.

That’s about belief in two things, that in writing my way through from where I’ve started, I’ll do better thinking, and therefore get to better words, right? And two is I want to see what I do as a creative practice. So sometimes I’ll write these one pages in different voices I love to write.

So I might write it in the first person. I interviewed people about giving up smoking years and years ago, 60 plus people. I wrote one of these strategy stories in the voice of someone with whom I had a really emotional conversation with.

And then sometimes I’ll be in the second person talking to you, or they’ll be in the third person. And I borrowed that from this guy, Marlon James, who wrote an awesome book that won the Man Booker Prize called, A Brief History of Seven Killings, which was written about the attempted assassination of Bob Marley. Each chapter happened in a different voice, and it sort of covered 20 to 30 years, with some of the drug dealers ending up in New York City.

And I was like, why don’t I borrow some of these techniques in my strategy work? Because I want to feel alive in my work. I don’t want to feel robotic.

Then I’ve had some clients take these strategy stories and take them into focus groups, which is interesting. One client took, I think, seven or nine for one brand into focus groups. I didn’t get to see the focus groups.

I’m curious to see how that went. You could try to quantify people’s reactions to some of this through some kind of pre-testing. Personally, in a perfect world, I’m choosing three of them or maybe one of them.

I’m trying to develop small bits of content that allow stakes just to see what sticks, and then allowing the content that works to survive, and then to eventually graduate to being the stuff that gets a lot of money behind it. That’s what I do in a perfect world, but that doesn’t really exist. So I wanted to create this like 16 years ago.

I wanted to have community management, data and analytics people at the heart of a brand, and create lots of little content, see what works, graduate the stuff that works, and then put the big money behind the hero, or turn the things that worked into hero campaigns. But just the way that most companies are set up, they’re not set up to do that very well.

Please excuse the interruption to your scheduled podcast. It’s Matt Davies here. It can be lonely out there when we’re building brands, and having a support network around us can be very valuable.

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We discuss all the latest topics in brand building, and we offer support to one another as we progress. As well as the monthly meetups, you have access to our Mastermind platform. You’ll have over three years’ worth of past recordings and access to message boards where you can get support from the group.

To apply, go to my website, mrmattdavies.me forward slash Mastermind. If you mention that you are a JUST Branding listener, you will be eligible for two free months per year as part of the group. So if you want to level up, grow, and be supported every step of the way, check out the Matt Davies Mastermind group.

I’ll see you there.

I’m still not clear on how you’d actually validate, or you’re doing five to 10 of them, but how are you choosing which ones to present? Is it just like a gut feeling?

Well, there’s going to be subjectivity. So it’ll be the strategist’s subjectivity. If I’m working with a creative team, they need to feel that they can work with it.

I’m not treating this part of the process as a science. To me, the academics can hate on this as much as they want. To me, this is like stand-up comedy, although not funny.

It is like stand-up comedy or it’s like writing a song or a poem where you have to get in front of people and see how they react. Getting in front of them means getting in front of them in a live environment. So stand-up comedians, they’ll write bits, they’ll test those bits in very small clubs, maybe 100 times, 200 times, and then eventually the best bits survive and make it onto the stage in a big stadium or onto a Netflix special.

So that’s the way that I like to work. But when it comes to pre-testing, you kind of need some kind of creative output, which could be, I’m just not the biggest fan of it all, but you probably need to brief at least one of these things in, which means you’ve already made the decision and get some kind of creative stimulus to people who react to, and even then, you don’t want them to be adjudicating it. Like that works, that doesn’t work.

It’s about how can we improve it. But I think that messy bit around which strategy to choose, I got a little bit sick of the pedantic discussions around that in agency world, so I kind of was sick of it because it didn’t lead to better thinking or better work. It just led to more meetings.

So I don’t really have a good answer for any of that. There are ways you can do like pseudo research if you wanted to. You can test different sentences in a survey if you needed to quantify some of it.

But one of the problems that I’ve seen a lot of, I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but is the rise of the product marketer. What they’ll do is they’ll, let’s say they write down five benefits of a product or seven benefits of a product, but they’ll use the most boring language. So you’ll get peace of mind, convenience, ease of use, quality, variety, right?

And then they’ll put that stuff into a survey, and it’ll either be like, what’s most important to you or what’s your biggest pain point? And it’s like, oh wow, 75% of people want peace of mind, and then that becomes the brief. That’s a shit brief, right?

Because they’re using crap to start with. So crap in, crap out. Did I distract you from the think of answer?

It is a tricky one, like bridging that gap, it’s always a challenge. So I’m curious just to go a little bit deeper, like would you choose one or two, like you’d present to the creative team, or like after all your years of experience, like with all the meetings and everything, like what do you do now?

Yeah, so I wouldn’t want to be surprising a creative team. However, a lot of creative teams are not set up to receive strategy well. It just depends on where you’re at.

If you’re in an agency, first of all, if you’re in an agency that appreciates strategists, that’s very different from being in an in-house team that has no idea why there are strategists there, but also copywriters and designers who are not conceptual. All right, it’s just, it’s a mess out there. I get around, I teach in all kinds of companies, and sometimes I will meet a creative director and I’m running through this and I’m like, I start to hear their background, I’m like, oh, you’ve been here designing brochures and banner ads for five years and now you’re creative director in charge of advertising.

That’s crazy because you’re not conceptually trained, but you have to pretend you are, and that’s why everyone’s frustrated, but we can’t talk about it. There’s a lot of that stuff going on in a perfect world. If I go back to Leo Burnett in Sydney, which is probably the peak of the creative people that I worked around, no offense to everybody else, but definitely there was a very hardcore high-achieving group of people there.

I would want to walk things around the building, little sketches, or maybe I’ve done 10 interviews, and there are two or three quotes on my mind. I’ll go have a chat to one of the main creatives that I was working with. That’s really hard in environments that are really hierarchical.

So that was really hard in the US. People love their freaking offices in New York. It was just so much arrogance when I first moved over.

They was like, how am I supposed to talk to anybody? Because they don’t like strategy, they don’t like strategists, they don’t get it. They haven’t worked with a lot of us who’ve done this kind of work in the way that Sydney and London and a few other places have more of a center of gravity around this.

But typically, I’m informal, show a few sketches. I want to get people’s reactions. If they give me words back that are better and more useful than what I’ve come up with, I’ll use their words.

I’m happy to channel people. That’s not me losing.

All right. Thank you for sharing that.

Can I just come in here? Because I think that approach, that informal approach is really helpful to share with everybody. Because that’s the behind the scenes stuff that people don’t really see.

You can see a polished end campaign or polished end positioning for a brand. But what people don’t see is the hardest thing sometimes is get that over the line, get that approved, get that out there into the market. I also find that, but I tend to work from a consultancy side very closely with the clients leadership team usually to get the strategy through.

I often find what you said absolutely correct, like sharing little tidbits along the way, informally, WhatsApp, ping, what do you think of this kind of thing? Just helps grease the wheels so that when you go to the official presentation where we say, right, everybody, we’re going to look at where we got to in terms of positioning and then putting that through is a lot easier at that point. So that informal approach, I also deploy to hopefully, to everybody’s benefit because as you say, otherwise, you go around and around and around, everyone wants data and stuff.

Ultimately, we are talking sometimes about a creative gut decision and sometimes, yeah, you can correct course, but you have to take a step into the unknown sometimes, obviously, based on your best guess, but that’s what it is. That’s the game we’re in and we live and die by that, and hopefully, we live. It’s my view.

But thoughts on that, Mark?

Well, I’ve read a little bit of research because I’m aware that there are essentially two types of people, which is utterly simply, so you can call it a spectrum if you want, informal versus formal. Like I’m informal, I don’t mind being on a stage presenting formally, I don’t mind pitching in a relatively formal way, but I don’t do well in environments that don’t have any informal interaction. Because they’re managing optics or they’re trying to trick people and catch them out so they can protect their position.

So I don’t do well in those environments. But if you’re working into a creative team, and not everyone listening or watching will be in a creative team, we’ll work with a creative team. Each creative team in a creative department can be a little bit different.

Strategists are going to have to calibrate themselves more to other people than other people have to calibrate themselves to strategists. For the strategist that is working with 10 different creative teams, three might be teams they connect with. A bunch of them might be people who just hate strategists, hate strategy, think they’re the strategists, like, why do I even need to work with a strategist?

I’m amazing. And then they’ll just be other people you don’t click with. I would want the fingerprints, the thoughts of anyone I’m working with when they’re good, to be represented in the strategic thinking.

But I would want the strategic thinking to have one voice. I would not want to write a strategy document or strategy presentation by committee with multiple voices. People second guessing the lead strategist.

Documents need a strong singular voice, even as they try to honor people’s input.

All right. So we’ll take a little bit of a turn here. And I’d like to talk a little bit about maybe challenges facing strategists and mistakes that you often see.

What do you think are the biggest challenges for strategists today?

Well, I know what they are, because I talk to strategists all the time. The number one that people talk about, and according to our surveys, is they don’t feel that clients confident enough to do interesting work. So they sense that there’s a lot of fear out there.

That’s one of the biggest challenges that strategists are talking about right now.

Okay. And what else?

That they don’t have enough time to do their work and connected that they have too much work. So in some markets around the world, especially India, Southeast Asia, 60 hours, 80 hours a week, people just working every day and feeling burnt out. Another one is people are struggling to get into the industry.

There’s a lot of people who are interested in getting into the industry. It’s not as glamorous and fancy as maybe it was at one point, but there are roles in more companies than ever before. There are probably fewer roles right now compared to a couple of years ago.

Then on the other end of that, people nervous about being pushed out because of age, and then people either wanting to get out or having been pushed out, not sure what to do next. So there’s some of the big issues that I hear about quite a lot.

So what are you telling these people? How are you helping them with that?

If you’re attracting clients that don’t want to do interesting work, then step one is try not to attract those clients. How? Two thoughts come to mind.

One is put interesting work, including stuff you’re thinking about, but creative work out into the marketplace. Don’t put so much mediocre work out. Then in any initial meetings, test the client for how connected to the style, the taste of work that you’d like to do that they would be.

Even if you admit that you’ve got to make stuff specific for the brand, you want to test them a little bit in those early interactions to see if it’s real. That’s stuff that people do in all relationships, they test each other to see if we’re aligned. Once you’ve attracted a client who wants mediocre work, which is probably 80 percent of the market, 80 percent of the market is probably in the market for mediocre work, it’s pretty hard to shift them unless there’s a crisis, unless you do something on the side, which I believe is how stuff like the Old Spice Guy and maybe even the Like A Girl campaign happened.

Some people got a bit of money together on the side. I think it’s true for both of them, it might not be. But a little bit of investment money, 10 grand here, 20 grand there.

Let’s just make a little thing and see what happens. Another way to try to do interesting work if you’re stuck is draw on, I mean, look, if all the channels that your brand is in are boring, it’s so hard unless you get carte blanche. Now, you could say, hey, let’s start with one channel, let’s choose TikTok and just try to get a little bit of traction there, and what works there, we can parade through the different channels.

But if you’re working on a brand where everything is kind of dead and the leadership team isn’t that interested in brand or creativity, you’re kind of in a dead end. So I would probably get out of that.

Well, thank you so much, Mark, for sharing all your wisdom on simplified strategy. Can you let us know where people can connect with you? Let us know about your podcast and anything else you want to mention.

Yeah, look, if you’re on the YouTube, I’m testing a few things there so you can find me. Just search for my name, Mark Pollard, or at Mark Pollard on Instagram, at Mark Pollard, yeah, on TikTok, just playing with different formats and different channels. I’m all over the place.

All right, thank you so much again, Mark.

Yeah, we appreciate you coming on. Super interesting conversation. Thank you and all the best.

Thanks for having me. Peace.

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