Evolution vs. Experimentation

Hi!

Did y’all see me featured in Forbes this week?

I got a chance to cover the world of marketing, strategy, and recovery from the pandemic with an emphasis on sports and concerts.

When this thing went live, I did something I don’t ever do…I listened to myself on a podcast.

Usually, I don’t do that.

But listening to the recording got me thinking on strategic frameworks. I hooked on the idea of “evolutionary strategy” and “experimental strategy”. So, let’s look at that this morning.

Let me start by defining both of them for you in my terms:

Evolutionary Strategy: you might think of this as command and control, two follows one, step-by-step process-oriented strategies.

An Evolutionary Strategy is based on logic and incremental change.

Experimental Strategy: would be something that is alive and adjusts as you experience new circumstances. To put it another way, a strategy that gets smarter through experience.

Why does that matter now?

It likely means everything.

Look at what we’ve dealt with the last 14-15 months, the world shut down, we’ve been locked away in our homes, our lives and businesses took hits…so it is a lot.

Yet, when I go out into the world, I see a lot of folks just rushing headlong into the idea that nothing has changed and that things will go back to the way they were before the pandemic.

An Evolutionary Strategy, do you think that is really going to set you up for success now?

What has the pandemic done but tripped us up at every step along the way, showing us that our best-laid plans are to be laughed at…right?

So why should we assume that every step will have a logical next step?

We shouldn’t.

On the other hand, look at the Experimental Strategy for a second.

Do we really know what the world is going to look like in a month or two?

We don’t.

6 months ago, we had no idea that the United States would be able to get 200 million doses of the vaccine into people’s arms and that we’d be able to see the beginning of things starting to look more normal.

Nothing has been a straight line.

Now when you consider where we are going, the idea of an Evolutionary Strategy is a little tough to swallow because stability and certainty have been absent for a long time, even going back to the Great Recession for a lot of folks.

How do we deal with Experiential Strategies now?

• Do your basics. Research, segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

• Create a strategy with SMART objectives.

• Build some action plans.

• Schedule some check-ins and milestones so that you can adjust regularly.

This isn’t the whole thing…obviously, but as we head out of the pandemic we have to keep in mind that things aren’t likely to head in a straight line. In most instances, they’ll do the opposite. So we need to be prepared…so experimentation is likely going to be our friend!

See you next week.

Dave