How to Adapt Creative Strategies to YOUR Business
How to Adapt a Strategy
Great differentiating strategies are all around us, the real entrepreneurial skill is in adapting the part of the strategy that works to your business so that you can get the desired results. The really great thing about strategy adaptation, is that you don’t have to spend the time getting the great idea, just taking the elements and structure of an existing idea and using it yourself. Now this is sometimes easier than others, but, like everything else, if it were that easy, everyone would be doing it. The lesson here is to practice your strategy adaptation and the actually apply it.
- Disect and debrief the strategy. The first thing to do is break the strategy down into its working parts. I like to do that by creating two or three columns on a piece of paper. One column is the challenge or obstacle, the other column is the part of the strategy that addresses the obstacle, the third column would be a note or thought column. In this case the obvious challenge is the 30 minute delivery guarantee. His solution is to use a boat. The thought/idea/note column might be something like: don’t sacrifice your position, look for alternatives to meet the guarantee.
- Brainstorm in the Notes column. What assumptions do we make about how product is delivered? In what ways can we delivery product faster? What are all the ways to deliver product to customers? In what ways would we NEVER deliver product and why? Now let’s reverse those answers. If I were to use currier services to deliver product…
- Create new offerings no matter how ridiculous they may seem. Now is not the time to be "realistic" now is the time to open your mind up to any possibilities. You can always tweak for reality later. They key activity here is to actually come up with an offering AS IF you were actually going to do it.
- Pick the most appealing or unique offering. Notice, I didn’t say pick the most realistic one. I said pick the most appealing. Pick the offering that (if implemented) would firmly position you as the obvious choice for your customer.
- Design it for reality. NOW, you can start looking at ways to re-engineer your offering for reality and cost effectiveness. Pick out the "impossible" parts and start looking for better solutions.
The critical point here is that sometimes, like in the case of our pizza guy, the solutions come as a brainstorm, this intuitive lightening strike. But sometimes, we have to force innovation, and that isn’t quite as exciting. It’s a lot like some of the fashion models out there who eat pizza and cheeseburgers regularly – it’s just good genes. But if you want to be a fashion model and you don’t have "good genes" then you’ve got a lot of work ahead.
Same here. It’s work, but it’s not impossible. Remember, this piza guy didn’t have the idea first, he had the challenge first. Oh, and one more thing – failure was CERTAIN if he didn’t come up with SOME kind of solution. Unfortunately, the gurus of marketing don’t always lay out the thought process for how that’s done – so I thought I would.
What’s your thought process for adapting strategies?
