Strategy execution – ensuring it all fits together

Effective brand strategies are like a well-made jigsaw but they can end up looking nothing like the picture that was agreed on

By Brian D Smith

Brand strategy reviews can vary from pointless charades to highly effective processes that ensure the strategy has a high probability of delivering on its promises. Whether your review process is the latter rather than the former depends on how well four critical questions are addressed by the brand team and the senior executives doing the review.

The first of these questions: ‘What do we know that our competitors don’t?’ and how to answer it was the subject of the first article in this series (The killer question, PME March 2024). The second question: ‘How does our brand strategy differ from our competitors?’ was asked and answered in the second article (What’s the difference?, PME July/August 2024). In this third article of four, we get down to the nitty-gritty of strategy execution, when those senior leaders ask a third question: ‘Do the parts of your brand strategy fit together?’

There’s a moment during the brand strategy review that is notorious for trapping naïve brand team leaders and leaving their professional reputation in shreds. I call it the ‘complacency window’ and it opens when the senior reviewers have signalled agreement in principle to the proposed strategy, move onto execution then ask some version of the ‘does it all fit together?’ question. If, at this point, the presenters think their task is almost complete, they have forgotten the maxim that business is 5% strategy and 95% execution.  Senior executives have absorbed this lesson and instinctively probe for ways that question even the best strategies, unless they are more than the sum of their parts. This leads them to dig into the nooks and crannies of the brand plan in what can appear to be a random, idiosyncratic way. Many brand teams fall victim to this, not least because it seems near impossible to anticipate the left-field questions they are going to be asked.

‘There’s a moment during the brand strategy review that is notorious for trapping naïve brand team leaders and leaving their professional reputation in shreds’

But, as ever, a minority of brand teams do find a way to foresee where they are going to be challenged. This prescience enables them not merely to anticipate the reviewers’ questions, but also to develop strong answers. They can do this because they recognise that strong and weak execution differ in four ways. In the following paragraphs, I’ll describe these four characteristics and how they strengthen your brand strategy execution.

If you have read the earlier articles in this series, you will remember that brand strategy is the term we apply to a conjoined pair of vital decisions – who will we offer value to and what kind of value will we offer them? The more clearly these decisions are made and communicated, the better basis you have for a strong programme of strategy execution.  But there’s a strange thing that happens in many firms. Those two brand strategy decisions are made, agreed and documented. And then shelved. The brand planning process moves onto agreeing operational activities almost as if those prior strategic decisions had not been made.

In practice, this leads to inconsistency between strategic decisions and tactical actions.  Marketing communications messages are written for the whole market, not the target segment. Medical affairs activity focuses on what that team thinks is important, rather than the intended value proposition.

Market access teams support value claims that they have evidence for, rather than what payers care about. Sales teams develop territory and account plans that direct their activity to where it can be measured, which is not necessarily where the strategy calls for it to go.  And so on, with hundreds of functional decisions creating a jumbled pile of market-facing activity, each individual piece of which looks great but which, like an unmade jigsaw, looks nothing like the picture that was documented in the agreed brand strategy.

Those few skilled brand teams whose execution activity is consistent with strategy achieve this with a simple trick. They spell out their two strategic choices in plain language, avoid burying them in a huge slide deck and ensure that everyone responsible for execution knows exactly what those strategic choices are and are not. If this sounds platitudinous to you, take a look at your own brand plan and your team of implementers. Are those two choices clear? Does every implementer know them?

‘Siloing often means that what happens in each silo may be very good as a stand-alone activity, but fails to coordinate with what is done in the other functional silos’

Even the simplest of brand plans involve multiple programmes and many activities, developed and executed by those with clinical, health economic, communications, sales and other specialist expertise. Although the brand team and matrix structures exist to coordinate this web of activity, most of the detailed design and execution happens within those organisational silos. This is a feature, not a bug, of complex organisations. It is necessary because specialist expertise is essential to make, for example, a medical education programme or a market access dossier or an omnichannel campaign effective.

In practice, this siloing often means that what happens in each silo may be very good as a standalone activity, but fails to coordinate with what is done in the other functional silos.  For example, marketing communications might push a message of trust and reliability while medical messaging might emphasise innovativeness. Equally, health economics arguments might use comparators that appeal to health technology assessment agencies (HTAs), while field teams take those arguments to differently minded local formularies and payers.  At best, such incoherence between different parts of the brand strategy execution might lead to a lack of synergy between functional activities. But at worst it may appear, in the eyes of the market, to be contradictory and confusing. And like any customers in any market, prescribers, payers and patients who are confused won’t spend time making sense of what they see, they will simply turn their attention elsewhere.

Achieving coherency and, ideally, synergy between disparate functional activities is difficult. Those brand teams that achieve it are distinguished by three factors:

1. Strong and fully engaged brand team leadership
2. T-shaped skills, meaning that each specialist also has a good understanding of how other specialisms work
3. A genuinely cooperative culture of idea sharing across functional silos.

Much of the theory about brand strategy and its execution comes from textbooks based on research in consumer markets. After all, it was in soap powder, food and cosmetics where many of the concepts of branding first evolved. At a fundamental level, these concepts apply equally to life sciences markets but, when it comes to brand strategy implementation, one huge difference between consumer markets and medical markets becomes critically important: consumer choices are usually made by individuals with relatively little thought and are often emotionally driven. By contrast, the choice to prescribe or use medicine or medical technology almost always involves multiple stakeholders and is typically a thoughtful, rational decision that considers a wealth of clinical, economic and other factors.

In practice, this means that brand strategy execution has to address a multi-stage decision-making process that, at each stage, involves various payers, professionals and patients to different degrees. And, at each stage, the prescribing or usage decision is influenced by different kinds of messages, using information from different sources and communicated through different channels. This dynamic complexity makes it easy for a brand strategy execution to miss something out. For example, a disease awareness campaign can generate interest that dissipates when there is no substantive material to satisfy that interest. A value based proposition can engage payers who then disengage when budget impact or comparative economic value is not addressed. In these and many other ways, brand strategy execution is a chain of activity and only as strong as its weakest, or missing, link.

Ensuring that the execution activity is complete and no links are missing is difficult. It becomes still more difficult as more stakeholders are involved and the decision-making process becomes more convoluted.

‘If the brand team either underestimates the resources needed to execute its strategy, or if it fails to win the allocation of those resources, execution will fall short’

Those brand teams that get it right are characterised by the way they map out the decision journey in meticulous detail and then assiduously align execution activity to that detailed journey. Again, the need for completeness in execution seems obvious, but in practice many brand plans contain several weak links.

A brand strategy execution plan can be consistent with strategy, internally coherent and completely aligned to how the market makes decisions – and yet still fail. That is because execution demands resources of people, money, time and knowledge, all of which are in limited supply and any of which, if not available in sufficient quality and quantity, can scupper brand strategy execution.

In practice, this means that brand teams have to accurately assess the quantity and quality of resources they need and argue for their allocation. That assessment must consider both the scale and scope of the implementation task. Strategies with modest objectives, facing weak competition in simple markets with one stakeholder require relatively limited resources. Ambitious strategies that face well-resourced competitors in complex markets with convoluted decision processes demand relatively large resources. If the brand team either underestimates the resources needed to execute its strategy, or if it fails to win the allocation of those resources, execution will fall short. To coin a baseball phrase used by one of my American clients, ‘the strategy will be bunt instead of a grand slam’.

To avoid starving the brand strategy of execution resources, a firm needs three complementary capabilities:

1. Brand teams must fully understand the quantity and quality of the resources needed
2. They must have the capability to construct and communicate a compelling case for the allocation of those resources
3. The reviewing senior executives need the capability to assess that case, allocate resources appropriately and avoid the instinct to be miserly.

Like the questions asked in the first two articles in this series, it is important to ask the third question: ‘Do the parts of your brand strategy fit together?’ It is just as important to answer it well. Asked and answered during preparation of the brand strategy, this ‘fit’ question leads to a much stronger strategy. Addressed during the strategy review, it makes that process much more effective. Despite how obvious and simple the question may seem, it is not asked often enough and it is even less common for it to be answered well. You can improve your brand strategy by understanding that effective implementation plans are consistent with the strategy, coherent with each other, complete across the decision-making process and appropriately resourced. Together, these four ideas will ensure that your brand plan fits together like the jigsaw of activity that it is.

Professor Brian D Smith is a world-recognised authority on the evolution of the life sciences industry. He welcomes questions at brian.smith@pragmedic.com. This and earlier articles are available as video and podcast at www.pragmedic.com