In the end, only results matter. Research is designed to increase the likelihood of success while cutting down the time to execute. Unfortunately, research often takes a lot of time and headache. And it’s often inconclusive, providing no clear tactical or strategic path.

It’s tempting to try to overcome this by (trying to) get better at research. But, I think this doesn’t work. All research is subject to doubt of some kind because it’s all hypothetical. There is no definitive research. There can’t be, because research is conducted before success can be measured.

Rather than lament these shortcomings of research, I suggest we give up on it as the primary means to improve results. Instead, I prefer quick launches with very robust measurement. This has the advantage of measuring reality, not some hypothetical audience target segment. With real measurement data, we can feed that back into the system and improve results.

In the end, I think that this approach will provide a much faster path to good results.

Combine all of these needs and communication breakdowns, and it’s suddenly much easier to realize why web refresh projects, large or small, bog down. Thus, the requirements laid forth in a business meeting aren’t always found in the final digital project. Thus, the artistic layout created by an external party (typically disconnected from the rest of the process) can not be applied to the chosen technology infrastructure in the manner it was designed. And, in the end, the content stays confusing, the navigation isn’t clear, and users still jump out to use Google to find pages on your site instead.

If this situation sounds familiar, it’s because most people involved in any marketing or general web redesign project have seen these issues time and again. This most happens when the process is purely internal and led by a few people with a specific agenda to address their personal needs. This unknowingly overlook concerns or people who need to be involved–people and issues which someone outside the organization could instantly recognize as crucial to the process.

The only way around this impasse is to bring key people from all groups involved early in the process together and discover whether the core working group is capable of communicating clearly. Business, marketing, design and technology can work together. But each role unconsciously assumes the others have an understanding of their operations and only certain details need to be remarked upon. In reality, a much more robust information sharing needs to happen. Technologists are often the worst in this respect, and many in our field must work hard to overcome this deficit.

And if the internal project group can’t do that, punt early and bring in outside help.

In addition, without a full understanding of these two things, it’s hard to connect them. As we all know, strategies are all too often shelved or ineffective. And tactics are all too often directionless. That is, strategies are often empty and tactics are often blind.

In the end, not fully understanding what these things are and aren’t can easily result in wasted time and money as well as in frustration and indecision.

In this presentation, I will offer definitions of strategy and tactics. Based on this, I will discuss the features of good strategy and good tactics. And I will add to this a crucial missing element, often overlooked: measurement.

At a revival, the audience has to be ready to be converted. They know why they are there. At a mission, the audience’s primary goal isn’t getting converted. But, the mission manager is appealing to their hunger and cold in order to get them in the door.

I’ve met many salespeople who want to run their companies like a revival. Only those truly “ready” to consume their service get in the door. The good thing about this approach is that you’re likely to convert more people. But, you will have a smaller audience. In addition, those who convert are more likely to stay converted, because this is the reason they are there in the first place.

Others work like a mission. They use non-sales methods to attract their audience. Then, while they are consuming these ideas/services/etc., they try to educate and convert them. Lead nurturing is like this. The goal here is to meet people’s immediate needs/desires, and then work on serving their “real” needs down-the-road.

Lots of people don’t think the mission approach is worth it. It takes too much time and effort, they say, to deal with these people and eventually convert them. On the other hand, the revival approach seems perhaps unnecessarily limiting. If you allow only a few people into the tent, then you naturally can’t convert more than a few people.

So, which is a better approach?

I am a fan of the mission. Without being deceptive, I think it’s important to meet people where they are and move them along gradually. In our business, we can’t expect our future clients to be fully educated and informed and ready to convert. This is especially true in today’s climate of layoffs and overwork. Many of our clients just don’t know enough to find, never mind attend, a revival.

Simply put, projects are tactics. They are always tactics. If you’re doing it right, they support a strategy. So, they can be strategic in this sense only.

When projects are used as strategies, not only does it confuse the issue, it sets the company up for failure. Strategies set out goals and define a plan to achieve them. They also establish metrics for measuring success. In this sense, they must stand outside and above any particular project. If you try to establish this level of strategic planning within a project, it won’t work. A project makes sense only when the goal, plan, and metrics are pre-defined by some other activity.

So, when you’re working on a project, keep in mind that it will be most successful only when it’s being used to execute some pre-defined strategy.

All these concerns are valid. But, I want to bring up something else. Even if these statistical potential anomalies are dealt with, you still might have invalid data.

This hidden source of error lies in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Heisenberg (a German physicist) taught us that, at least in the realm of subnuclear physics, you can know the position or the motion of a particle, but not both at the same time. This is true because every attempt to know these features alters the particle somehow. In other words, the measurement tools themselves introduce changes in the subject.

We can apply the same “observer effect” to our understanding of market research. Imagine a focus group. You’ve convened this focus group to learn if one of your new offerings will meet a need. So, you ask the group something like “Do you have a need for a waterproof flashlight?”. This seems harmless enough. But, the problem is that just that question, just the thought of that question, introduces new thoughts to the members of the target audience. They had never thought of a flashlight that’s waterproof. So, now they are thinking about it. And whether they say “yes” or “no” to the question, there is no doubt that the question itself caused a change in the audience.

You might think that the problem here lies in the formulation of the question. Perhaps it would solve the problem to ask something more like “What needs do you have?” However, even this seemingly unprejudicial question causes changes. For one, people don’t think of having “needs”. They live their lives in an active way; they don’t contemplate their existence and thematize their mental states. To even to ask them to do this causes them to disengage from their active “use” of their needs and think about them objectively. And this conceptualization is a different view, thus their perception is altered by the question.

Does this make market research impossible? Couldn’t we do some contextual research instead of asking questions? If the subject knows she is under observation, we will have the same problem, just at the level of action instead of verbally. What if she doesn’t know she’s under observation?

This might be the best approach, but I still think we have a fundamental problem. Even the observational act places the subject into a certain artificial context. That is, to even observe another human being is to alter their existence to “fit” into your frame of reference. In this sense, it is perhaps impossible to know what “market needs” anyone really has. Perhaps it’s just as impossible as ever really knowing anyone. Human beings are just not objective beings (like trees or rocks).

So, should you give up on market research? Probably not. Just be careful. Be aware of how your observations and study can alter the object of your study. And because of this, don’t be a slave to the research data (or researchers). That is, be prepared to downplay or even eliminate research that doesn’t seem to fit. Sometimes, there is no substitute for good old human judgment.

We already covered 2 major reasons that communications work fails in execution: execution is deceptively complex and execution takes a long period of sustained work. This time, I’ll add a couple of more reasons.

3. Execution is practical. It takes real skills. By this, I mean that it’s very clear if the execution is working or not. The materials “look good”, or they don’t. They are well-designed, well-written, and well-conceived, or they are not. They speak for themselves, whether favorably or unfavorably. It’s its own expression.

Thus, execution is much more susceptible to criticism and judgment. And these evaluations are much clearer and easier.

I do mean to imply the converse. Strategy is hard to judge and evaluate. This is because the strategy is not objective or concrete. It only promises that. And, in some sense, the strategy can’t be judged before its execution anyway.

So, for these reasons, execution is hard to produce because the standards are implicitly higher than for strategy.

In some sense, strategy is easy to fake and execution is impossible to fake.

4. Another reason that execution is hard is that it doesn’t attract as much talent. For some reason, strategy is considered to be more challenging and much “cooler” than execution. Execution is looked down on as “beneath” strategy. For this reason, strategy attracts more senior talent than execution. Indeed, it’s often the case that, after a few years in the mines and trenches of execution, individuals can “graduate” to become strategists. This suggests that only at the strategic level is where the real work happens.

When the work is staffed like this, the already-difficult execution phase loses much of its guidance. Without seasoned, senior executors guiding the work, the work derails. I see this all the time where the “strategic” minds can’t be bothered helping with execution because they don’t consider it worth their time.

Conclusion

So, to sum up, execution is much harder than commonly conceived. There are many pitfalls between a well-conceived strategy and a well-executed communications program. Next time you start working on execution, don’t forget to give it the time, attention, supervision, and staffing it deserves.

So, why is communications execution so difficult?

1. To start with, the execution is usually around 90% of the overall effort required. Strategy just doesn’t take as long. (Of course, there are exceptions—projects where the strategy is somehow over 50%—but I regard these as not just abnormal but as an abomination.) This means that the execution will require many more people, more skills, more planning, more direction, and more organization. The complexity of the work increases geometrically with additional resources and work streams. So, the execution part of the work can quickly become a great deal of inter-related parallel work, especially compared to the relative simplicity and linearly of the strategy. Thus, personnel that functioned perfectly well during the strategic phase might become overwhelmed and ineffective during execution.

2. Moreover, execution takes much more time (duration). Hopefully, the strategy gives good direction. But, over this extended time, there is a great deal of opportunity to forget the strategy entirely. This happens most commonly when an execution is based on a previous execution, rather than on the original strategy. In the diagram below, you can see how this should work.

There is always some variation in the execution. But, if you return to the strategic path before the next execution, you will come close to the planned result. If, on the other hand, you base the execution on the previous execution, this will happen.

Here, the result is far from what is desired and planned. The most common way this happens is that a new piece uses a previous piece for brand and communications guidelines. The natural variation in execution, then, means that the execution gradually “wanders” from the strategic path. The more time elapses, or the more pieces executed, the wider the strategy-reality gap widens.

The solution is to ensure that the project personnel in the execution phase are 1) well-versed in the strategy, 2) believe in the strategy, and 3) capable of managing the execution at the level required. To be sure, it’s often very difficult to find personnel like this. The strategic phase seems easier to staff, because the work product is documentation. In reality, the work is much harder, but almost no one is capable of judging whether a strategy is good. In the execution phase, deadlines are met or not, quality is high or not. It’s very easy for everyone to evaluate the success of the project leader.

Next time, we’ll look at 2 more reasons why executions fail.

To be sure, the communications strategy is often the greatest source of a client’s problems. Their strategy, if they have one, is often poorly targeted and poorly planned. This means that it will be double-difficult to achieve the goals.

Moreover, it seems that any good exercise will start with the strategy. Indeed, I have discussed this before under the topic of strategic execution.

In addition, strategy is often much easier to perform than execution. More specifically, I think it’s true that it’s easy to have an adequate strategy. But, it’s very hard to have a good strategy.

For these reasons and others, most clients want to start with strategy.

Yet, this isn’t the whole story. For one, don’t forget that strategy needs execution. No strategy can stand alone. It must always include some idea of its execution. This means that, at the very least, the execution has to be considered when planning the strategy.

If the execution is not considered, and planned for, the strategy will never be executed. And the execution is difficult. The execution is so difficult that it’s the primary reason that communications strategies fail.

For these reasons, I recommend that clients start with the execution. It seems counter-intuitive, but it leads to more success.

In the next post, we’ll look at some detailed reasons that communications execution fails. And in the post after that, we will consider what it means to start with execution.

1. It’s a win-win-win. This arrangement offers benefits for everyone involved. The client gets better work. The consultants get more work. And the agency gets access to different projects.

2. Greater differentiation. When consultants can offer design services to their clients, they can differentiate. Same thing with agencies. When they can offer consulting services, they have more value to their clients.

3. Longer, deeper engagements. When you can own a greater share of what the client’s doing, you can do a better job (and make more money). With an upstream or downstream partner, you get to be in more conversations and stay involved as the project runs its course.

4. Cross-pollination. Consultants can learn from agency folks, and agency people can learn from consultants. When your personnel are exposed to a whole new way of thinking, working, and understanding the world, interesting things start to happen in your own organization.

5. Strategic execution. As you know, I frequently post about how strategy and execution are intertwined. When the consultants and agencies get together on a project, it’s easier to make sure that the strategy is related to the execution and the execution to the strategy.

6. Lower costs to the client. Blended project teams are typically cheaper for the client because there is no ramp-up time required. Also, the agency doesn’t spend its time trying to rewrite the strategy of the now-absent consultants. (Believe it or not, this problem is very common.)