Big Picture Strategy

8Benchmarks: Learning from Our Work

Whether creating a new category, igniting investment in an existing one, or working to grow your brand at the expense of a competitor, sustaining brand performance requires a tight alignment of strategy and execution. Strategy is your long-term plan – based on a series of logical hypotheses – about the best way to take your brand to market to achieve a goal. Execution is all the organizational behaviors performed in service of achieving that goal.

Great strategy without execution equates to unrealized potential. Great execution without a strategy can deliver short-term performance but, as market conditions change, is unlikely to sustainably continue to deliver. The reason is simple: lacking a feedback loop between actual organizational behaviors – as experienced externally by the market – and the plan that drives them, the company will just run in place not getting anywhere.

The image the comes to mind when I think of an organization that doesn't integrate strategy and execution is that of a hiker in a deep forest running in circuitous loops. To avoid this, you need metrics: tools that quantify actions or trends. Organizations are complex systems that operate in broader and even more complex markets. Metrics establish learning processes that guide the organization in its path toward its particular goals.

Within the Big Picture Strategy method, marketing metrics are the tools used to confirm or disprove the hypotheses that underpin your strategy ...