At last the magic ingredient of Coca Cola’s success is now being shared. No, I am not talking about the tightly-guarded ingredients of its flavoured water.
Rather, how it allocates its precious resources for brand communications to ensure its future success by ‘gaining a disproportionate share of popular culture’. (Isn’t this what you are about: aiming to gain a disproportionate share of your stakeholders’ culture?)
For several years now, when facilitating Brand Communications Reviews or Strategic Awaydays I had been advocating an 80:20 formula – 80% of the things you do, you play safe, tried and tested; 20% you go for innovation, try new things, play, experiment, and engage more with risk.
By using this recipe, I believe you can get the best balance between safety/change and risk.
Coca Cola in its major strategic review Coca Cola 2020 goes even further. It uses a 70:20:10 ratio.
70% of activity is Low Risk, bread and butter stuff;
20% is Innovative on what works, tending to be activity engaging more deeply with specific audience (but still has broad scale)
10% is for the High Risk, potentially tomorrow’s 20 or 70% activity, where learning intent is declared upfront, and you are prepared to fail by celebrating both failure and success.
In the year ahead it’s going to be tough, But it’s not about the survival of the fittest, but rather the survival of the best fitting: who can best adapt to chnages, new demands, and capitalise on available opportuntities. How are you going to devise your 70:30:10?
Here are some key strategic tools I will be harnessing in the brand workshops I will be running for clients during 2012:
1. Be uncreative Part One: Do a faster/quicker/cheaper review of what you currently do.
2. Be uncreative Part Two: Plan for 70 or 80% of your resources to be conservative, low risk, safe bet.
3. Do a Traffic Light Analysis of your activity: what do you need to stop, what needs to continue and in what areas do you need to go ahead
4. Do something awesome with your 20 or 30%
5. What would your role model do?
6. Do a pre-mortem. Imagine yourself in a year’s time looking back on the previous 12 months in a scenario where your plans created a disaster. Examine why it was a disaster. This is a great technique as it legitimizes doubt and gets you to challenge much-cherished activity.
7. Just do the right thing
If you are not planning a strategic review for 2012 – will you still be here next year? What are you going to do different in 2012? How are you going to be best fitting to your new world?
