The Ultimate Threesome: Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics

by BJ Bueno and Scott Jeffrey
About this author

On the third move of a chess game, nine million positions are possible. This is only a board game. Imagine how many more options marketing team face in the normal course of business. From image to font type the list is endless. In this confusion, a marketer enters an endless world of To-Dos. This leads to the ultimate mistake: You start confusing motion with progress.

We all live in get-it-done-today world. The temptation will always be to become tactical fast–getting things done and making people in the organization perform endless tasks. If this cycle is not understood correctly you can trap your teams in endless meetings and empty task with no progress on the horizon. Unless you have unlimited time and money, you simply can’t afford to be going in a million directions that don’t support your brand.

In order to avoid the maze of confusion and build your brand effectively, you must infuse your thought process with three simple distinctions: Objectives, Strategies, and Tactics.

1- Objectives lay out your target—your ultimate goal.

2- Strategies set your basic guidelines and provide a framework for thinking.

3- Tactics are the various methods you utilize to achieve your objectives.

These three elements are great companions in building your brand because they give you the cohesion to keep everyone on your team moving in the same direction.

Setting Your Objective

The team whose coach says, “We are going to make it to the super bowl,” makes it to the big game … then losses! The team who wins never intended to just get there—their coach said, “We are winning the whole damn thing!” When setting objectives you have to state exactly what you want.

The objective of Southwest Airline’s brand is to operate a low cost business in order to offer low cost fares to their customers. From buying only model plan for their entire fleet to naming a President of Fun, every decision supports their overall objective.

Developing Strategy

Once you understand your objective you need to develop your overall strategy. Everything you do—every piece of communication, every single activity that affects your customer (which is everything a newspaper does)—should push the strategy ahead. Every person that affects the reader (which directly or indirectly is everybody in the company), needs to clearly know, understand, and internalize the strategy so he or she is able to make decisions and take actions that will move the newspaper closer towards the objectives.

SouthWest’s strategy of having a President of Fun, by its nature, lowers the turnover rate of employees which translates to cheaper fare for their customers.

Mastering Tactics

Having a strategy won’t automatically make the tactics apparent, but understanding your brand’s objective will help make these choices clear. Marketers who solely focus on tactics too easily abandon the overall objective when a tactic fails. They confuse a tactic with the overall objective. When a coach loses a game, he doesn’t change the objective of winning the next game. He simply changes his approach after learning what he can from his prior failing. Tactics often fail. You still have to spend endless hours testing and retesting, refining and thinking about your tactics.

If you want to establish a clear brand in the minds of your reader, you are first going to need a clear brand in your own mind. You can’t expect anyone to understand your vision unless the direction is clear within yourself. Objectives, strategies, and tactics … three invaluable friends you need in your journey to build your brand.

Onward.

This article was originally published in Idea Magazine.