The FLASH approach: reducing risk in developing strategy

Ever since my earliest career days in the 1990s, I've encountered a common problem: a dichotomy between strategic directions and customer context.

Whether it's a product designer observing that users in a testing situation "don't understand the genius of this particular product concept," or marketing strategists lamenting a massive delta between customer expectations and pre-formulated strategic directions, a lack of market insight embedded in strategy can easily undermine business performance.

In a world that often views business as a "set of levers," the pressure to "optimize the controls" can often override the need to understand the basics of why customers choose to do business with particular companies in the first place. 

Too often, the commonly-held perception that consumer intelligence activities are too time-consuming, costly and esoteric leads to "gut-driven" strategies filled with guesswork and assumptions, but little actual data or insight.  This non-market-driven guesswork is then "validated" by relatively fast traditional marketing research methodologies that employ questionable techniques to understand consumers' alleged value systems. Any market-representative insights that are contrary to the preceding guesswork are viewed with trepidation or even outright hostility, and usually rejected or ignored.

However, the omnichannel connected world of 2015 provides consumers with a myriad of competitive choices -- as well as an easy-to-access platform for expressing their displeasure -- amplifying both the intensity and business impact of backlashes from customer bases to shifts in strategy that are based on such "validated" guesswork. 

As a result, the level of risk in strategy development has never been higher.

Consumers swiftly reward companies that understand and address their needs with unprecedented levels of success -- and rapidly abandon brands that have failed to meet their needs.   Even some of the most brilliant business leaders in technology, retail, financial services and manufacturing have failed to understand this dynamic and learned painful lessons over the last decade -- their travails are commonplace in the headlines of contemporary business media.

The situation has created a conundrum: how should business leaders balance the need for rapid organizational optimization and alignment of resources with the demands of a transforming marketplace that is filled with unprecedented levels of risk?  How can today's businesses rapidly develop effective strategies incorporating consumer intelligence without having to reformulate pre-existing strategies that don't fit market needs?

The answer is ensuring that your strategic planning process deeply integrates consumer intelligence using a FLASH (Fast, Lifestyle-oriented, Agile, Strategic, and High-Impact) approach.

Implementing a FLASH checklist is a simple, yet powerful way to ensure that your strategic planning approach balances the agility, speed and ROI that modern management theory demands with experience-driven insights that ensure success and reduce risk:

• Fast: Consumer insights to underpin strategy don't have to take months or years to collect, and they don't have to be scary things that invalidate pre-formulated strategies. Qualitative and quantitative insights professionals can help you extract useful and interesting trend data from consumer interaction analytics, ethnographic fieldwork, and even analysis of social media using advanced AI. In fact, it's likely that your insights team has already developed a point of view that is seeking a strategic implementation -- start your strategic planning process with this point of view to add tremendous value with no delay at all.
• Lifestyle-oriented: Particularly for B2C markets, understanding the range of customer lifestyles is crucial, as these provide a detailed map of everyday behaviors as well as identify areas of opportunity where the industry (and competitors) are failing to address experience gaps in everyday life.  Deeply understand, measure and track lifestyle habits with a host of analytics, instrumented intelligence, and ethnographic techniques to formulate truly market-transforming strategies that uniquely solve consumers' unmet or partially-met needs.
• Agile: Insights, strategies, products, services and channels can all become stale without an agile approach to engagement.  Great strategies and insights evolve rapidly and pivot with changes in consumer behavior and market context.  Drive agility in corporate strategic planning by permanently and frequently refreshing the cycle of insight-driven strategy -- insight collection and strategy development should be viewed as a permanent process, rather than a project.
• Strategic: Often, consumer insights and experience design alike are viewed in a tactical framework such as pricing and market share -- missing out on significant opportunities for strategic innovation.  If strategic outcomes aren't baked into the insights process, a large portion of the value of consumer insights are lost.  Always scope consumer intelligence activities with a formal requirement to deliver strategic insights -- big-picture, design-thinking-driven opportunities -- that inform strategies driving competitive advantage.
• High-impact: In a world of limited resources across staff, time, and budgets, maximizing ROI is critical.  By creating a threshold of opportunity, strategists and researchers can pursue the opportunities that are not only most interesting, but also offer the highest return on investment.  This threshold can be as simple as only deep-diving on opportunities that have over $10 million in annual margin opportunity, or as complex as concept testing and generative research addressing a completely unmet need within a key segment of the marketplace.  Insist that every insight activity stream  includes a clear, direct impact statement to ensure maximum returns.

By using FLASH to drive agility, consumer insights, accountability and measurable results, business leaders can counter the risks of the 21st century marketplace and deliver the outstanding performance that stakeholders demand.