“We want to grow at x% by y” is a typical top tier management saying at annual starter meetings or at mid-year motivational meetings, when things don’t go as expected so far. The entire company is getting whipped up by this saying to get more revenue from their clients and achieve the growth agenda at the end. This is a very abstract and shorthanded view on how our shareholder value driven economy is working – but basically the reality in a lot of our companies. To make it more tengable to the own employees the growth agenda is often specified into: we want the growth to come out from division A or product B. So the employees from these business lines now know: “oh shit, it is on us”. Do they know what to do exactly and how they will actually achieve the demanded growth? – probably not. Because they are missing the direction and the competitive advantage that sets them apart from market competitors (= strategy).
Growth – what is it?
When looking at the term “growth” we might also mistake it as a goal. It is something that we want (most likely in the future) but has no concrete declaration. Only if we say we want to grow by x% by the next 2 years, we can see this statement as a goal. It is not a good goal, like putting it into the SMART schema, but it is a goal that is very common in day 2 day business practice. Growth on the other hand we can seen as a general result of fortuned and well executed companies activities. Growth has become a very popular term nowadays, there is growth hacking and marketing in the marketing field that has dedicated itself to the mantra of get bigger (at all costs). Especially in this fields I see the absence of a robust business strategy to basically create that competitive advantage that makes the difference. The tactics and tools to get customers quickly, like artificial scarcity, member get member and others are proved to work, but can not replace a clear positioning and added customer value in a sustainable way.
So what is strategy then?
One of the best definitions and added up excellent explanations is the one from Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and one of the world’s leading thinkers on strategy:
So strategy is in his definition a set of choices that enables you to win on a chosen playing field. The topic of positioning is in this definition a very important one – and in general in the entire strategy world. But it is as well a well know marketing term coming out from Kotler’s STP framework for marketing strategy: segmenting, targeting and positioning.
To draw here, coming from business strategy to marketing, a circle on the strategy topic is quite important, as we can see how integrated and important are marketing strategic questions for the entire business operation: answering the questions of which customer to serve and how to deliver value to them is essential and crucial. And those answers have to be more sophisticated than “we want growth”.
We believe that strategy and marketing must go together and reflect this as well in our service offering.
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