Following a recent Digital Media Marketing lecture by Jennifer Stoll, VP of Strategy at Valtech, a global business strategy agency, a series of questions was posed to the class.
“What is strategy?”
“What does a Digital Marketing Strategist do?”
“Does a career as a Digital Strategist appeal to you?”
In her own words, Jennifer defined strategy as being about “answering questions and providing direction and evaluating things from different viewpoints”. As, “looking at [a project] from the customer’s point of view. [What] do we need to accomplish and what creates that right experience.”
American business management guru Patrick Lencioni lends cogent wording to an age-old analogy when he says “If you could get all the people in the organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.” And as much as it personally pains me to quote anyone who consistently donates money to Republican political campaigns, Lencioni is right.
I have often told people myself that life works best when you set a goal and work towards it. For me that has included wrangling professional wrestlers to stage live events and recruiting art teams to create graphic novels.
Jennifer gave the example from her own recent career of a client asking for a series of websites to be built and, without input from a strategist, the creative and tech teams went about building the sites. When the client returned and saw the work, their reaction was to ask what the decision making process for the sites had been. A lot of time, energy and money had been spent to create websites that no direction.
And hence, rowing in the same direction. Much like the coxswain, facing forward and steering the boat while the rowers face him or her as they set the crew’s pace, the creative and tech teams at an agency benefit from the guidance of the strategist, giving the project, and their efforts, direction. Setting a goal and working towards it with everyone involved on the same page… rowing in the same direction.
We get little tastes of this in our group project work: Each of us bringing our ideas to the table and discussing them before, hopefully, deciding on one course of action and divvying up the workload. But in a “real world” environment, with hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of dollars being invested and possibly dozens of people working on a project, the need for a strategist becomes more and more clear.
Someone needs to take the rudder (to continue the rowing team analogy). Someone needs to set the pace and watch over the team members to keep the boat moving efficiently towards the finish line.
Does this appeal to me, career-wise?
Yes. Yes it does.
But for now, taking my first steps into a marketing career, I need and am eager to put my book learnin’ into practice and gain the kind of experience in that aforementioned real world that I believe it would take to be an effective strategist.
CITATIONS
Lencioni, Patrick. “If You Could Get All the People in the Organization Rowing in the Same Direction, You Could Dominate Any Industry, in Any Market, against Any Competition, at Any Time.” Twitter. Twitter, December 4, 2019. https://twitter.com/patricklencioni/status/1202282969458565120?lang=en.