A friend sent me her 2019 brand plan on Sunday night and asked if I would read it before she walked the leadership team through it. I read it Monday morning at Ovation with a cortado going cold next to my laptop. Forty-one slides. Gorgeous type. A section called Brand Pillars containing four abstract nouns and no verbs.
I wrote back and asked what was different from the 2018 plan.
She took most of the day to answer, and when she did, the answer was the numbers.
Which is the whole problem, and it is not her fault. It is the season's fault. The first working week of January rewards a document that looks finished. Nobody in that room is grading risk. They are grading polish, and polish is easiest to achieve by keeping last year's architecture and swapping the growth targets from eight percent to eleven.
A plan that could have been written in any of the last four Januaries is not a strategy, it is a budget wearing adjectives.
I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and I have three tests I now run before anything gets circulated.
One. Does the plan say no to something specific and named? Not "we will focus," which is what people write when they intend to keep doing everything. An actual name. A segment you are leaving. A product line you will stop propping up. Patagonia's whole posture works because the company keeps publicly declining business it could take.
Two. Could a direct competitor sign this document without changing a word? If yes, you have written a category description, not a position. Swap your logo for theirs and read it out loud. It is a humiliating exercise and it takes four minutes.
Three. What would have to be true for this to work, and how will we know by June? Most annual plans are unfalsifiable. They cannot fail, because nothing in them was ever specific enough to be wrong. Write down the assumption. Write down the date you check it.
None of this requires more slides. It usually requires fewer. The plans I have seen actually change behavior tend to be short, a little ugly, and uncomfortable to present, because the discomfort is the evidence that something is being wagered.
A plan that could have been written in any of the last four Januaries is not a strategy, it is a budget wearing adjectives.
I told her to cut it to eleven slides and lead with the thing she is willing to stop doing. She is going to hate the meeting. It will be a better year.
Truffles sat on the printout for most of the afternoon and Barnaby knocked my pen off the table twice. Neither of them asked what was different from last year. They already know the answer is the numbers.