30 Days of Live Strategy | A Retrospective (3)

The final batch of rapid-fire strategy retrospective.

This set of ten has a good category spread: tech, entertainment, food, and even ocular surgery.

The final entry of the whole challenge - sell gin to Chinese diners - feels especially pertinent, as I learned just yesterday that foreign spirits make up less than 1% of the alcohol market in China. I knew it was low, I didn’t know it was that low.

With that knowledge, I’m more confident in my initial approach: taking market share from the incumbent baijiu is best, since they are both strong white spirits and the Chinese spirit dominates the market with around 70%(!) share.

A few of the strategies in this batch leant into flipping a negative.

One of the most useful reframing approaches, a successful negative flip accomplishes two things:

Acknowledges the brand/product’s imperfection: regardless of how this is handled tonally, this can be an effective disarmer for prospective customers.
Shifts the consumer goal: sometimes the best way to serve the customer to remind them of a latent goal that they might not be getting from their current category choice. If people prefer showers because they are convenient, show them the cost of that convenience. Think about what they are missing out on.

In the case of bath houses, I might have a rethink on what the true competition is there though.

Taking daily showers is a tough behaviour to dislodge and replace with the inconvenient luxury of bath houses. Perhaps the real competitor is a similar ‘pampering’ behaviour such as massages or a staycation. Then we might think about how the indulgence of steam and water of a bathhouse might be positioned to deposition that behaviour.

Another highlight for me was the retirement one.

People at the start of their careers likely have clearer visions for their career path than the shape of their retirement.

But like careers, the retirement chapter can be very diverse. It’s a rich strategic territory, one that could leverage a lot of real stories to get young people thinking about what they want their own retirement to look like.

After posting all thirty of my 30 Days of Live Strategy challenge, I feel invigorated at the amount of discussion I can pull out, over two years later.

The exercise wasn’t just a useful practice then, but gives me pause for reflection on the strategic fundamentals today.

Ultimately, finding a great way-in and a cohesive story to wrap it all together in are paramount.

Once you can be confident your strategy serves the brand’s business and the customer, the rest will follow.