30 Days of Live Strategy | A Retrospective (1)
Just over two years ago, I was inspired by a little strategy exercise I spotted on Twitter.
Marco Del Valle - now at Uncommon in London - was posting a new strategy every single day for 30 days. It was creative and brave, and I challenged myself to do the same.
It was scary.
It was fun.
It pushed me in ways I wasn’t expecting.
The great thing about doing it in public was the accountability. I think I missed one day (published two the next), but apart from that I kept to the schedule.
Not all of them were winners, but I think a few of them hold up and would make the beginnings of an interesting brief.
Over the next few weeks, I will jump into some (maybe all?) of them and run a retrospective evaluation. I want to pull apart the thinking and see if there are alternative avenues that I missed at the time that might make better approaches.
For a start, here are the first ten! Originally published in January of 2022.
Day 1 - sell Instant Pots to Chinese home cooks.
Day 2 - sell Airbnb Experiences to hosts.
Day 3 - sell 23&Me to Chinese consumers.
Day 4 - sell robo-advisers to young Chinese.
Day 5 - sell Finn’s car subscription service to car owners.
Day 6 - sell D&D play podcasts to (non-)listeners.
Day 7 - sell flotation therapy to new customers.
Day 8 - sell bullfrog to foreign diners.
Day 9 - sell chopsticks to fork users.
Day 10 - sell improv to young professionals.
Reflections
🙋 Problems are Harder than Solutions
Taking a look now, I remember that the biggest challenge was rarely the solution, but coming up with the problem in the first place.
As you can probably tell, a lot of these are influenced by my own lived experience.
Lots of China-inspired briefs.
Products I was trying, buying or using (instant pots, flotation therapy and D&D podcasts).
Day 4 was even inspired by a job interview case question.
🍄 Freedom of Constraint
The four points framework from Mark Pollard really helped keep my thinking disciplined. It forced me to write as simply as possible, since there was no room for elaboration.
One short sentence per point, move on. And make sure it all fits together.
🥢 The Versatility of Strategy
I’m a brand strategist with agency experience, but a few of these ideas have implications beyond comms (with more to come in the latter 20).
For me, that’s a really exciting part of our discipline.
Strategy at its essence is a single organising thought that overcomes a problem to achieve a goal. And this exercise was a great reminder to the universal, cross-discipline nature of that.
Stay tuned for the next batch.
