Today, everyone wants to be strategic. Everyone wants to focus on the big picture. After all that’s where the real fun lies, that’s where the most senior, most talented people make their mark.

Some time back, an agency I worked with parted company with one of its clients, a real A-list brand name. The reason? The account had gone very ‘tactical’.

By tactical, the person I’m quoting meant that it had gone from being a strategic brand-level assignment where we got to do big advertising campaigns down to a nitty-gritty tactical account where activity was about delivering short term results at break-neck speed.

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I can understand the desire of so many marketers to be strategic. I’ve spent much of may career coming up with strategies for a wide range of clients. But, of course, strategy is nothing without execution. Without tactics, all you’ve got is 120 slides of high theory and wishful thinking.

I’ve lost count of the number of presentations I’ve seen outlining the most beautifully elegant strategies. Strategies that present a clockwork series of events that will inexorably lead to world domination. But sadly, which are so complex with so many dependencies and with a view of a world that only exists in textbooks that they are doomed to failure.

Getting things done

When push comes to shove, tactics are where real change happens. It’s also where all too often you discover that the fancy sounding theories and pretty diagrams of pyramids and onions don’t quite fit with the real world. A world where customers are not lining up to buy your product. Where competitors beat you to market. And where not even your own salespeople stay on message.

The real world demands we make stuff happen. That the strategies we create are simple enough to execute and flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances. That the tactics we use in and of themselves can deliver strategic advantages for our brands.