I recently shared my experience on LinkedIn of being asked last year by an agency to upskill one of their Account Directors into a Strategist by simply ‘teaching them the frameworks’. No can do, obviously, as it displayed an astounding lack of understanding of what Strategists do and how and where they add value.
But it got me thinking about all the times I’ve come across people who call themselves Strategists but obviously aren’t and the horror stories I’ve heard from agencies about accidentally hiring freelance Strategblaggers and getting back, for example, a 40 slide word-salad powerpoint deck as a creative brief.
As well as Account Directors who magically turn into Strategists overnight, without even a Strategist in their agency to sit next to and learn from, there are a fair few ex-clients out there who seem to have thought ‘how hard can it be?’.
I call myself a T-Shaped Strategist, because if the core job, the vertical line of the T, is helping to make the creative work better and more effective (from client brief to creative brief in its very simplest terms), there are lots of specific things that a well-rounded and well-trained Strategist needs to be good at in order to support that.
I’m not even counting ‘being good at powerpoint and having a lot of charts, slide formats and frameworks in your toolbox to help communicate what you’ve learned and sell-in why this is the way forward’. Or ‘being able to write a really good, short, inspiring creative brief and brief it in properly’, this is specific additional knowledge, understanding and skills that a Strategist should have acquired. Can they:
- Carry out themselves at a simple level and also know how to effectively brief an expert supplier on desk research, qualitative research, quantitative research, data science, digital analytics, competitor and market audits and store audits.
- Create and deliver/lead a day-long brand workshop, developing a tailored format that relates directly to the problems we’re trying to address, is appropriate for the level and culture of people attending and generates useful, actionable outputs as well as stakeholder buy-in.
- Facilitate 40-minute-long 121 stakeholder interviews with very, very senior clients or their customers, flexing the discussion guide in real-time according to each conversation and reporting on relevant themes, insights and implications, not simply what people said.
- Professionally referee internal client discussions/arguments and have enough of an understanding of how organisations work and how they create shareholder value in order to get involved with other areas of the business if required, e.g. ‘can you brief the Head of People on any relevant themes that came out of the store manager interviews’, ‘can you join this working group on pricing’, ‘can you draft my talking points for the conference panel’.
If they tick all, or nearly all, of those boxes, you’ve got yourself a Strategist. If they just bat on about insights and frameworks, proceed with caution.