Brand Strategy 101: A Community — Centered Approach
This is an intro to an article series on why brands would fair better if they centered community voices upstream in their strategic planning and tactics on how they can do so.
It is quite remarkable how often leadership teams faced with complex problems — staffed with well-educated, well-compensated and immensely talented individuals — end up producing content, experiences, and products with little to no strategy behind them. Demonstrated by a completed event with no metrics or a developed product with disappointing sales performance and no buzz, a lack of strategic planning can result in a wide range of frustrations from misallocation of resources to employee fatigue.
But the real tragedy of having a weak strategy is recognizing that your long nights had zero to no impact on your audience, your community, or society as a whole.
I’ve spent my career as a strategist primarily working with brands creating content in an effort to connect with their audiences during cultural moments. As I like it, my role has always been behind the scenes — executing in partnership with creative producers what you see on screen and in magazines from insights I’ve drawn from psychographic, biographic, and cultural trend data. I love research, I love people and I love community building. And I know for certain that winning…
