No Bullsh*t Strategy: A Founder’s Guide to Gaining Competitive Advantage with a Strategy That Actually Works

The core job of a strategy – any strategy, not just a value-based one – is to determine actions. To tell you what to do. It’s a blueprint essentially, guiding you in your decision-making process.

Value is instead the benefit that your consumer gets from your product. The thing they get from it which they “value” enough to choose it.

Make no mistake, the value is the thing the company makes, not the product. I’ll repeat: your company is not your product; it’s the value it delivers.

We’re trying to find unique characteristics of our business which have the potential to create open market space if we push them hard enough.

Unique value is: Value that your customer cannot get from anywhere else.

Remember, only strategies which your competitors might choose not to do are legitimate. Strategies which everyone would agree with, and which everyone would be keen to pursue, are illegitimate.

Only is better than best. No matter how much better you think you are than the other brands around you, it’s nothing in comparison to being the only brand who does what you do.

Offer compelling value to your customers. Which lots of them want. Which they can’t get anywhere else. Which your products deliver effectively. And which your brand communicates memorably.

So recognise that our job here is not to “create” a strategy, but rather to find a strategy that is already latent in our business as it is today.

High-interest categories can support sophisticated value offerings. Low-interest categories can only support blunt value offerings.

Strategy – in its rare, non-bullshitty forms – is the secret sauce that elevates business to an art, and that has the power to create extraordinary brands who stand out like beacons in their categories and have no competition.

the whole point of a strategy is that it sends you on a different path from anyone else. If you’re not going to do that, then why bother strategising at all? Just cut out the middleman and straight up copy your competitors. Easy.

Can you see how that simple insight, the identification of a need for such a kind of space, shaped everything that Starbucks did, and drove their stellar growth? And can you also see how clear, direct, and compelling it is? How you could describe it to anyone in the pub and they’d totally get it – let alone people in the Starbucks team? That’s a strategy. That’s something that will shape the entire direction of a business. That makes everything fall into place. That creates real value. And that changes the way people think about an industry. It’s rough, big-picture, and totally transformative.

In its purest sense strategy is simply: A plan designed to achieve a particular goal.

From here on out, whenever we talk about strategy in this book, we’re going to be taking about this: The unique value a business provides to the market.

business is nothing more than a system designed to deliver value and receive value in return (generally in the form of cold hard cash). The more value it gives, the more it gets. Therefore it stands to reason that the most fundamental, most effective form of strategy is simply for a business to maximise the value it puts out.

Quite simply, unique value strategy is totally universal – applying to every company at every level. Whether you are the chairman of General Electric or selling friendship bracelets out of your bedroom, you are in the business of delivering value.

The main way people screw this up is by confusing the value they provide with the product or service they make.

None of these are “value”; they are the means by which the business delivers value. Value is instead the benefit that your consumer gets from your product. The thing they get from it which they “value” enough to choose it.

As you can see, the products are merely varying mechanisms of delivering the overarching value. Make no mistake, the value is the thing the company makes, not the product. I’ll repeat: your company is not your product; it’s the value it delivers.

You will struggle to create meaningful differentiation because most products are, by their nature, generic. All cars do the basic job of “being a car”. It is only in the space of incremental value that similar brands are able to differentiate themselves. 2.You will struggle to evolve and adapt in the long term, because you will remain “married” to this single “thing” that you make – whereas with a value focus you are able to endlessly come up with new ways to deliver that value.

Unique value is: Value that your customer cannot get from anywhere else.

All of this stuff is category generic, and hence has no strategic leverage.

The market doesn’t reward better; it only rewards different.

And it’s market position, opening up white space, that counts.

Only is better than best. No matter how much better you think you are than the other brands around you, it’s nothing in comparison to being the only brand who does what you do.

That’s why good strategy is just so valuable. Finding something that loads of people want but which isn’t already offered is like striking gold. You can’t get it simply by asking people what they want – you’ll never get a new answer there. You can only get it from lateral creative thinking – the kind of stuff we’re going to focus on as we go through this book.

It means a benefit you deliver to your customers, which they can’t get anywhere else, which lots of them want or need, and which is big enough to animate an entire brand.

The core job of a strategy – any strategy, not just a value-based one – is to determine actions. To tell you what to do. It’s a blueprint essentially, guiding you in your decision-making process.

At the top, you have the strategy – i.e. the unique value the business aims to deliver to the market; its existential core; its telos if you like; its raison d’être. Below this you have the delivery – i.e. the physical way the business actually does this via its products and services. And then finally you have the brand – i.e. the way the business presents and communicates this offering to the outside world.

Offer compelling value to your customers. Which lots of them want. Which they can’t get anywhere else. Which your products deliver effectively. And which your brand communicates memorably.

strategy is instead bounded by two things:   •The conditions of the market (i.e. the context in which you’re operating) •The nature of your business currently (i.e. the thing you’re trying to guide)   An effective strategy emerges when these two things interact harmoniously; when the business “fits”, just so, into market conditions.

Space It’s an infinite open territory, where brands sit in different places depending on what value they offer.

great strategies produce companies which have no direct competitors at all.

We commonly refer to this situation as “commodification”, but I prefer to think of as “clustering”, because it emphasises the irresistible way businesses in a market typically drift together over time.

Stop thinking of your competitors as things to “beat”, and start thinking of them as things to manoeuvre around and complement.

there are two ways a business can arrive at such a position, depending on what kind of company it is:   •Is it a company that “weirds the normal”? •Or is a company that “normalises the weird”?

“weirding the normal”, by which I mean taking a product or service that people are already familiar with and twisting it, so it becomes something new and exciting, and thus opens up fresh market space.

starting from a generic category, and then sought to bring a new value offering into the space. In other words they took something “normal” and made it “weird”.

generic, well-recognised, well-established category (cars, funeral services, socks, cereal, gyms, laundry detergent, etc.), then your job is simply to find a way to make it seem fresh and different.

“I thought I knew X, but wow, this is totally different.”

That’s what normalising the weird brands need to do: push themselves towards a pre-existing space, with well-established norms,

We’re trying to find unique characteristics of our business which have the potential to create open market space if we push them hard enough.

“The Dolly Principle” in honour of Dolly Parton, who summed it up with the phrase: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”

So recognise that our job here is not to “create” a strategy, but rather to find a strategy that is already latent in our business as it is today.

Dull brands are those which are timid in execution and try to spread themselves too thinly over multiple market positions. However, if you attack your strategy with no apologies and no compromise, I guarantee you’ll end up with something awesome on your hands.

The goal with our strategy is step away from our competitors and to create fresh market space 2.We must do this by leveraging existing characteristics hidden in our business 3.When we find those tendencies which connect with the needs of the market, we have the raw material for our strategy

The actions you’ve taken which have been surprisingly successful •The actions you’ve taken which have failed •The inherent qualities of your product relative to those of your competitors •The inherent weaknesses of your product relative to your competitors •A helicopter vision of the market landscape •An understanding of your adjacent markets •An understanding of the norms of your category •Etc.

Instead, all you have to do is frame it against a different category, or set of competitors, than you are doing currently.

The true competitor The true competitor of Harley Davidson is not Yamaha, BMW, or any other motorcycle brand; it’s a conservatory.

Rather than assuming – as most brands do – that your competitors are other brands that look like you, or that make the same kind of product as you, you instead need to shift your perspective to see your competitors as other things people might buy instead of you.

Most brands have lateral, unexpected competitors like this. Competitors against whom they’d have massive advantages if they just framed themselves that way.

They gradually differentiate themselves from their “obvious” category, and yet… 2.Will also never truly match their “new” category, and so will wind up in the uncontested market space we are seeking, just like this:

Ultimately the true competitor is anything that will steal attention from you and make you lose a sale.

second method, “unexpected value” – i.e. bringing a value offering to the category which has never been seen before and which goes against expectations. We might even call it “surprise value”.

“What is a form of value that would make sense in this category, but which nobody has ever thought of delivering before because it seemed irrelevant?”

What is our category not? What things would you never really associate with the stuff that you and your competitors (or true competitors…) do?

Why? Why does this value not exist in this category? Does it simply not make sense? Would it be unattractive in some way? Or would it be perfectly sensible, and its absence is nothing more than a failure of imagination?

They asked:   1.What are we doing that’s both unexpected and working? 2.How can we capture that? 3.How can we double down on it?

when we introduce unexpected value to a category, we are breaking “invisible rules”, rules which everyone else in the category follows without even realising they’re doing it.

This is what contrarian value is all about. Here, we aren’t saying “look at this new thing I’m offering”. Instead we’re saying: “Everyone in this category thinks X, but we think Y.”

This is contrarian value. When you decide to attack or neglect something in the category that everyone else cares about and in doing so unlock new territory.

Contrarian value means actively cultivating weaknesses The other counter-intuitive thing about developing contrarian value is that it involves not only accepting your weaknesses but nurturing them.

When developing a contrarian value proposition, a good place to start is by identifying the areas you underperform in currently and then exploring what it would mean if you were to underperform even more. What if you were to deliberately suck at them? What would happen then? What opportunities would that open up?

opinions are more concerned with the way facts interact.

Useful strategies have the power to:   •Align the whole business under a single coherent direction •Provoke new ideas and initiatives pretty much instantaneously •And most importantly, be understood by absolutely everyone

Strategy, as we’ve established, is all about difference. About the path that you’re choosing to take which is different from everyone else’s.

This is an internal thing; it doesn’t need to sound nice or elegant; it needs to sound specific and unambiguous.

It’s not the strategy that’s actually going to get you results – that’s just some words on a piece of paper, or in a PowerPoint – it’s the actions the strategy provokes. The changes that will make you different tomorrow from how you were yesterday. They need to be big, binary, and in your face if you want to get results that are like that too.

You must remove all subjective language from your strategy and see what’s left.

The job of a strategy is to tell you what to do. To give you an actionable plan.

You need to explain how you’re going to excel at that thing. That’s your strategy.

In either case you would be offering something that it would be rational for your competitors not to offer, and thus you’d be opening space.

Remember, only strategies which your competitors might choose not to do are legitimate. Strategies which everyone would agree with, and which everyone would be keen to pursue, are illegitimate.

who are you trying to alienate? Who are you trying to turn off? Who are you trying to push away?

many brands get in trouble when they confuse goals for strategy.

The how cascade is a tool you can use to resolve this issue – and make sure you don’t accidentally move forwards with a goal / strategy. The way it works is simple. To any strategic statement or idea you might have, ask this one word: How? How are you going to do that thing you’re stating?

The art is recognising which “slice” of the cascade represents strategy – and the answer is that it’s the first layer where a solution is proposed, but before getting into executions of that solution.

High-interest categories can support sophisticated value offerings. Low-interest categories can only support blunt value offerings.

Put simply: if people don’t care about your category, don’t try and make them.

a crucial ingredient of any strategic value offering is a deep respect for the consumer – for their time, for their priorities, and even for their biases.

am I doing something genuinely new here? Something genuinely “challenging”? Or am I actually fighting a straw man, attacking an enemy which old challengers defeated years ago but who they pretend still exists for their own marketing purposes?

Challengers challenge the status quo today. As it is right now. They do not set up an imaginary map of the market and challenge that, no matter how flattering and righteous it may feel.

Any strategy that needs a drawing of some sort to explain it has already got some serious problems.

Your job when putting a strategy to paper is simply to explain it so that anyone who reads it, gets it.

single page of A4, with a few paragraphs of argument and explanation, culminating in the punchline (“therefore we are going to do X”).

Although your strategy ultimately will culminate in a single sentence (“our strategy is to do X”), in order to give someone a real understanding of it you’re going to need give them an explanation too.

“Because of this factor, this factor, and this factor, the smart thing for us to do as a business is X.”

master strategy document – the one that ultimately every action in the business must refer back to – you must include the argument as well as the conclusion.

What I normally do are four sections:   •Background •Strategy argument •Strategy summary •Delivery

Here’s the situation •Here’s our reading of it •Here’s our idea •Here’s how we manifest that •Here’s how we package it   In other words an entire business, top to bottom, laid out in a few simple paragraphs.

strategy only exists if it can be perceived from the outside of the business, not the inside – and that takes a hell of a lot of commitment.

outside perspective and accountability is the only way you can really “cure” these issues with any degree of certainty.

What is the bare minimum you need to do in order to be genuinely following this strategy? Typically (although, I stress, not always) this will probably be something like:   •Minor tweaks to existing product •Introduction of / planning for new product •Rebrand

what do we need to do in order for people outside the business to understand what our strategy is?

As such the strategy must be perceivable by the market, otherwise it may as well not exist at all. So most of your key executional actions are likely to be very externally visible.

A strong strategy should prompt a deluge of potential ideas and behaviours. You should be able to tell it to anyone and have them come up with a couple off the top of their head.

We’re trying to create difference here, yes, but crucially it must be coherent difference. And that means “stacking” your strategic actions in order of priority: recognising what is a must, and what is simply a nice-to-have.

“big to small”. Starting at the macro level and working your way down to the micro level in a sequential fashion. This applies to the relationship between strategy and strategic action (“big” strategy cascades down to “small” action), but it also applies within action itself (“big” foundational ideas precede “small” textural ideas). Keep everything in that cascading order, and whatever you produce is bound to be deeply coherent – the essence of strategy.

But you’re going to need to intensify it in the direction your strategy leads you.

Cross-category copying is where you copy elements of the branding of other brands with similar value offerings – providing they are in totally different categories.

Naturally whatever you’re copying needs to be intuitively understood by the market as representing that thing you’re offering

there is one circumstance where you would copy your direct competitors, and that’s if you’re a brand who is “normalising the weird”

What links them is not simply that they are strategic, but rather that they have all gone to extreme lengths in over-delivering on their strategic offering. This is what makes them charismatic, distinctive, and easy to talk about.

“canvas” for creative expression is something like:   •Visual identity •Copy lines •Advertising campaigns •Social media platforms •Website

Naturally the specifics of this canvas will vary depending on the brand, but if we imagine, say, a gym chain it might include:   •Design of the space; how does our strategy demand this look? •Choice of equipment; is there anything unexpected we should add, remove, or even invent? •Staff profile; what sort of person should work here? •Staff behaviour; how should they behave differently to other chains which would be on-strategy and memorable? •Additional amenities; what should our gym offer outside of fitness which no other chain has, and which would have an amplifying effect on our strategy? •Locker rooms; how do we do this differently? Do we even have locker rooms?

“why” is at root a leadership tool. Its job is to inspire and motivate people – whether that’s your team, your partners, or your customers.

the “what” or the “how” – that’s the strategy.

What we’re going to do, and why it will work —> Strategy Why it would be a “good thing” if we were to do this —> The “why”

the strategy manifests at the coalface, meaning it’s as much the concern of rank-and-file employees as it is anyone else.

A well-thought-out why serves to connect the strategy to such employees, and to make them feel that it’s something they want to get involved with.

three broad categories of why that you might consider:   1.Consumer benefit why 2.Category change why 3.Social good why

Consumer benefit why A consumer benefit why is a pretty easy one to come up with, as it will fall directly out of a value-oriented strategy. Essentially the motivation is the good thing you’re going to do for your consumers.

Category change why When a consumer benefit why doesn’t do the job, you should consider shifting to a category change one. In this instance you are essentially declaring your intention to “revolutionise” the category

Social good why Finally we have the social good why, which naturally is what people typically imagine and tend to gravitate to first, since it’s “noble” and therefore has strong motivational force behind it. And indeed, if you can claim that your strategy is going to have some wider social or ecological benefit – even as a by-product – then that’s great.

In all likelihood yours is going to be fairly similar to a lot of other businesses, and that’s fine. What makes the difference is how you’re going to go about achieving that lofty ambition – i.e. your strategy.

This strategy defines what your company is for – and clearly, whatever this is, it shouldn’t have a shelf life. Your goal is to hold the same position indefinitely.

If you stand still but the market doesn’t, your strategy will change without you knowing it.

The point here then is simply this: You must keep moving in order to stand still. You must constantly be re-executing your strategy in order to fulfil it in the latest market and cultural context.

“multi-layer pacing”, which is a fancy way of showing that the more strategic an element of the business is the less it changes, and the more tactical an element is the more it changes. To see what I mean we must first divide a business into layers in descending from the strategic down to the tactical, something like this:

The macro strategy – “what the business offers in the market” – basically never changes.

at the product level, if you’re lucky changes won’t have to happen very often either, but obviously you must be responsive to market trends (in a way that Innocent, say, weren’t). You must always ensure your product delivers your value, and whether that requires frequent change or not doesn’t really matter, just so long as you deliver. Operations then are naturally always in flux, not specifically for strategic reasons but more because that’s just the way things are. And then naturally day-to-day marketing at a campaign level thrives off novelty and so changes a lot, even if the overall message remains static.

true strength comes not from knowing a few facts or ideas, but rather from internalising them so you no longer have to think about them at all.