An agency head once called me the Nanny McPhee of Strategy and swore it was a compliment. I think he meant that I might ask challenging questions and poke around in awkward corners, but by the end of the project the clients wouldn’t want me to go. A Head of Strategy later said that I ‘operate with great gravitas at senior levels and cut through nonsense with great charm’, which I think is more or less the same thing.
So when I stumbled across these lyrics from the upcoming Nanny Mcphee stage musical, written by Nanny McPhee herself Emma Thompson, it made me sit up:
When the cloth
In life’s patchwork
Starts to fray and tear
Then I shall be there
To sew
And when I finish
With mending
Every tattered shred
Then I have to go
But I will always
Leave you
With needle and thread
As strategists, particularly brand strategists, are we remembering to leave our clients with needle and thread? It’s all very well doing the hard work and generating huge strategy decks, but after the big reveal and hurrah, if your clients and their agencies can’t actually implement it, or incorporate it into their day-to-day outputs, if it doesn’t then help move the dial for the brand and the business, what’s the point?
I recently worked on a brand project where I had to balance creating something the internal team could understand and execute easily, against crafting something that would inspire the kind of brave creative that changes a brand’s trajectory. It’s two very different use cases.
Agency strategists tend to be brilliant at the inspiring-creative bit, but I rarely see brand bibles/books that are more of a user’s guide to the strategic approach. Perhaps we should think of them as sewing kits instead?