Research gives you the information to understand what’s happening. Strategy requires someone to interpret it, connect ideas and make a distinctive choice about the role the business will play.
A little while ago, we were asked to name and create packaging for an existing houseplant-care product. It was a three-in-one slow-release gel that watered, nourished and protected the plant, and it was being marketed primarily as something to use while you were away on holiday.
There was nothing inherently wrong with that idea. The product did the job and the benefit was easy to understand. But it gave people a reason to use it only a few times a year, and it overlooked something more interesting about both the product and the people who might buy it.
Research in the sector has shown that new houseplant owners were often unsure about the care regime their plants needed. It also shows that overwatering was one of the most common ways people killed them. The formulation of this particular product meant you couldn’t overwater your plants, removing much of that risk.
Those insights were already known, but they were sitting separately. Once they were connected, the role of the product changed.
Rather than presenting it as an occasional holiday fix, we repositioned it as a simple weekly care product for new and nervous houseplant owners. It could help people enjoy their plants without constantly worrying that they were doing something wrong.
The potential audience became larger, but the messaging didn’t become broader or more generic. It spoke directly to a widespread and emotionally relevant problem. The shift also increased the potential frequency of use from a few times a year to once a week, which the formulation and instructions supported.
The name and packaging were important, but the more significant work happened before that. We connected separate pieces of evidence and reinterpreted the commercial role the product could play.
That, for me, is the difference between analysis and strategy.
The point where analysis stops
I’ve seen businesses collect research, study the data and draw perfectly valid conclusions, then present those conclusions as the strategy.
The analysis might tell them that customers value convenience, sustainability is becoming more important, the category lacks trust or younger consumers expect a better digital experience. It might reveal what competitors are saying, where the market is growing and which benefits customers care about most.
All of that is useful. It gives us a better understanding of the problem and stops strategic thinking becoming detached from reality. But it doesn’t tell us what to do.
“Customers want convenience” is an insight. “Sustainability matters to our audience” is an insight. “Everyone in the category is making similar claims” is an insight.
None of those statements explains the distinctive role the business has chosen to play, or the choice it will make as a result.
The missing step is interpretation. Someone has to decide which findings matter most, connect them in a way that may not be immediately obvious and make a choice about where the opportunity lies.
That requires judgement and creative thinking, not simply another round of analysis. (for further reading on this see our blog: How people choose: emotion, reason and the power of creative marketing)
When that step is missing, the resulting strategy tends to sound generic. It is full of words such as “best”, “better”, “quality”, “innovative” and “customer-focused”. You could attach it to almost any other business in the category without anyone noticing.
Alex M H Smith articulates this well in No Bullsh*t Strategy*. One of the principles he uses is:
Only is better than best.
Trying to be better than a competitor feels logical, but it still leaves the business competing on the same terms. A more strategic question is whether it can offer something people want but cannot get in quite the same way elsewhere.
“Better” is an ambition. It isn’t yet a strategy.
Observation, insight and the creative leap
Liquid Death is a good example of what happens between the evidence and the strategy.
The origins of the idea have been traced back in part to the Vans Warped Tour, where founder Mike Cessario saw musicians refill Monster Energy cans with water. The water fulfilled the practical need, but the energy-drink can fitted the setting and the identity of the people on stage in a way that an ordinary plastic bottle didn’t.
Cessario later described asking himself what he would actually want to be seen carrying at a party.
The observation was that musicians were disguising water in packaging that felt more culturally appropriate.
The insight was that people don’t choose a drink solely because of what’s inside it. The packaging also signals identity, belonging and whether the drink feels right in a particular environment.
The strategic leap was to create a water brand that borrowed the cultural codes, attitude and entertainment value of beer, energy drinks and heavy music.
The tall can, skull, name, irreverent personality and “Murder Your Thirst” line all expressed that strategy. They weren’t the strategy itself.
Another business might have taken the same observation and created a refillable bottle for performers, a festival hydration campaign or a conventional water brand with slightly more energetic packaging. None of those routes would automatically have been wrong. The evidence didn’t contain one inevitable answer.
Someone had to decide what the larger opportunity was and commit the whole brand to that interpretation.
That’s the leap analysis can’t make for you.
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Surprising, but not random
Liquid Death sounded ridiculous to plenty of people at first. Cessario has described an earlier version of the canned-water idea being rejected by a client, and even referred to Liquid Death as the “dumbest possible name”.
What made it work wasn’t that it was outrageous for the sake of it. There was logic beneath the apparent absurdity.
The observation connected to the insight. The insight revealed an opportunity. The business then created the product and brand around that opportunity.
A good strategy may be surprising before it is explained, but it should feel logical afterwards.
It doesn’t need to be obvious. If it were obvious, the rest of the category might already be doing it. But it should be understandable.
A strategic leap should have a traceable chain:
We observed this. We believe it means this. Therefore, we have chosen to do this.
The logic may take some explaining. It may bring together ideas that are usually considered separately. People may disagree with the interpretation or feel uncomfortable with the risk, but they should be able to follow the thinking.
Research and modelling can test the assumptions, expose weaknesses and reduce uncertainty. They can’t eliminate uncertainty completely, particularly when a business is trying to do something genuinely new.
It’s called a leap of faith for a reason.
That doesn’t mean closing your eyes and hoping. It means making an informed judgement when the available evidence can’t give you certainty.
Smith describes a similar balance as:
Lead with imagination. End with analysis.
Creativity helps produce possibilities that linear reasoning might never reach. Analysis then returns to test whether those possibilities stand up.
Strategy has consequences
A distinctive strategy will rarely appeal equally to everyone.
Liquid Death couldn’t create a brand around heavy-metal imagery, aggressive humour and a name designed to provoke without alienating some people. Softening the identity to reassure every conventional water buyer would have weakened the very thing that made it distinctive.
Alienation wasn’t necessarily the objective. It was a consequence the business had to accept.
Good strategy doesn’t reject customers for the theatre of it. It makes a clear decision about the role the business will play, who is most likely to care and which category expectations it is prepared to challenge.
Businesses often find this difficult because a broader audience appears mathematically safer. A larger pool of potential customers should mean more sales; a smaller pool should mean fewer.
But a large theoretical audience isn’t the same as a large effective audience. If the offer is so broad that nobody finds it particularly relevant or memorable, the business may speak to more people while persuading fewer of them.
That doesn’t mean every brand needs to pursue a narrow niche. Many everyday products legitimately have mass appeal. The choice might instead concern the benefit the brand leads with, the way it frames the problem, the experience it provides or the commercial advantage it chooses to strengthen.
The distinction isn’t simply mass versus niche. It is undifferentiated versus deliberately positioned.
Plant food is a useful example. Healthy plants, beautiful blooms, glossy leaves and stronger roots are all valid benefits. They are also claimed across most of the category.
A business can put those messages on the packaging and design them beautifully, but it will still be asking the product to compete on familiar ground.
Finding a distinctive direction might mean creating formulations specifically for people who want to garden in harmony with nature. It could mean developing a once-a-season range for time-poor gardeners who want to feed and forget.
Those aren’t simply different headlines. They require decisions about the products, range, claims, instructions and future development.
Smith argues that a workable strategy needs to involve some sacrifice: a clear sense of what the business is choosing not to pursue. Otherwise, it risks becoming a communications idea flexible enough to mean almost anything.
Strategy is not the creative expression
It is also worth separating the strategy from the way it is expressed.
The tone of voice, logo, packaging and campaign all help people recognise the strategic idea, but they aren’t the strategy itself.
A useful way of thinking about the different elements is:
Strategy: the distinctive role the business has chosen to play in the market.
Values: the principles that influence how it plays that role.
Personality: the characteristic way those values and strategic choices are expressed.
Creative work: the tangible form that combination takes in the market.
They should be intrinsically linked, but they aren’t interchangeable.
For a new business, the strategy will often play the leading role in shaping the personality. If a brand has chosen to make water feel culturally at home at gigs and parties, a calm, earnest wellness personality would make little sense.
For an established business, the relationship can work in both directions. Its existing values, personality and reputation should influence which strategic choices feel believable. A new strategy may evolve the personality, but the business can’t ignore the meaning it already holds in people’s minds.
This connects with the argument I explored in A brand is a gut feeling. Marketing can influence the story people tell themselves about a business, but it can’t simply overwrite everything they already know and have experienced.
When a commercially logical move creates a brand problem
Smart cars illustrate this tension.
The original Smart had a distinctive role. It was small, unconventional and associated with intelligent urban mobility. It appealed to people who valued economy, environmental responsibility and quirky design, as well as those who enjoyed making a less obvious choice.
The current UK range is centred on the #1, #3 and #5 electric models, with the compact two-seat #2 announced for 2027. The larger cars may make sound commercial sense, but their connection to what originally made Smart distinctive is less immediate.
Analysis could easily support a move into larger electric cars. Consumers want more space. SUVs remain popular. Electric vehicles are a growth opportunity.
The harder strategic question is whether pursuing that opportunity creates a distinctive role for Smart, or simply brings the brand into a more crowded part of the market.
When we looked at this challenge, the most credible bridge seemed to lie not in the dimensions of the original car, but in the kind of person who was attracted to it.
The new range could be positioned as the grown-up choice for the same independent-minded audience: people concerned with economy and the environment, people drawn to quirks and innovation, and people who aren’t afraid to stand out.
But targeting those “free-thinkers” would become marketing spin if it existed only in the advertising.
The products would need to provide evidence through distinctive design, useful innovation, clever battery management, meaningful customisation and an ownership experience that continued to think differently.
The addition of a city car would help reconnect the range to Smart’s roots, but one familiar product couldn’t carry the whole story alone.
Marketing spin asks people to interpret an ordinary offer differently. Strategy changes the offer and the business around it so the interpretation becomes credible.
When a strategy creates a brand people can join
Our work with ecofective began from a different kind of disconnect.
The brand had good intentions. It wanted to offer products that were planet-friendly, avoided harsh chemicals and were kinder to bees and pollinators. But those intentions weren’t expressed with enough commitment or personality. The brand risked sounding like any number of well-meaning products making broadly similar environmental claims.
The more distinctive strategic direction was to speak directly to people who wanted to garden in harmony with nature and make them feel part of a group of similar thinkers.
That decision shaped the personality. The brand became optimistic, energetic, slightly rebellious and collective.
It also shaped the creative work:
- If you believe there’s a better way to grow, you’re one of us.
- Together, let’s grow better.
- A Joyful Rebellion.
- The soul in the soil.
The language acts as a rallying cry because the strategy gives it something to rally around. Without that strategic choice, the same phrases would simply be decoration.
The business also had to get behind the idea. The strategy brought to life something the team had been thinking but hadn’t been able to express, and it set a clearer direction for the decisions they would make in future.
Not everything changes overnight. A good strategy can describe the business you are committed to becoming, provided your actions show that the commitment is real.
Strategy can lead change, but it can’t remain permanently ahead of reality.
As I explored in A brand is a gut feeling, contradictions between the projected story and the experience can be disproportionately damaging. If a brand invites people to join a movement, its products and behaviour have to give them a reason to believe in it.
Creative work needs something distinctive to express
A generic strategy can still produce attractive creative work. But without a distinctive role or point of view behind it, the result is likely to feel familiar.
You can create a good-looking pack around healthy plants, stronger roots and beautiful blooms. The design may be well crafted and easy to understand. But if every competitor is telling essentially the same story, the work will struggle to give people a meaningful reason to choose the product.
That is why the brief itself sometimes needs to be challenged.
The houseplant-care project wasn’t transformed by applying a more stylish design to the existing holiday message. It became more commercially interesting because the evidence led us to question the role the product had been given.
The same was true of ecofective. We could have created attractive packaging around familiar claims about natural or environmentally responsible gardening. Instead, we revisited the foundations and helped shape a brand with a more distinctive personality, purpose and role in the category.
This is where strategic and creative thinking need to work together.
At WrightObara, our role is often to interpret the available evidence, challenge the brief where necessary and identify a more distinctive strategic direction before translating that thinking into a name, identity, pack, campaign, film or other creative work.
The creative execution makes the strategy visible, but it can only express what the business has actually chosen.
A strategy also needs to survive contact with everyday marketing. If each new brief introduces a different message or creative direction, the business can quickly slip into tactical firefighting, however good the original thinking may have been.
Look at your strategy again
None of this is intended to diminish research or analysis. Both are essential. Without them, strategy can become self-indulgent guesswork.
But they aren’t the same as strategy.
Look objectively at the strategy your business is working to. Does it describe what the research found, or does it explain the distinctive choice you have made as a result?
Could the same words belong to almost any competitor? Does the strategy depend on vague promises to be the best, better or more customer-focused? Is there a logical connection between the evidence and the direction?
Has the business connected ideas in a way that reveals a less obvious opportunity? Does the choice influence what you create, prioritise and decide not to do? Can customers see evidence of it in the product, experience and marketing?
Analysis describes the market as it is. Strategy interprets that evidence and decides what distinctive role the business will play within it.
The evidence doesn’t make that decision for you. At some point, someone has to make the connection, choose the direction and take the leap.
Making that choice is only the beginning. The next task is to invest in it consistently enough for recognition, memory and meaning to accumulate. We explore that longer-term challenge in The best time to invest in your brand was years ago.
Need help turning evidence into a clear direction?
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