How Your Past Informs Your Future

I have always found it invaluable to return to the origins of a brand when designing a new growth strategy.  So much can be learned from your heritage.  A few years ago, it was quite common for teams not to know this story in detail, especially in corporations.  That has changed with the recent focus on Purpose which invariably mines the history of a brand for its foundational reason to be.  The strategist will often want a much deeper business perspective than the Purpose agency, so I want to summarize what I typically look for and learn from the back story.

First, where many businesses start is not where they end up. A lot of stories begin in wholly different places.  A combination of circumstance, opportunism and necessity often create a pivotal moment that started the journey to where you are today.  Look for the origins and more importantly the apex of the business.  You will be inspired by the clarity you discover.  It will usually be one powerful, scalable idea.  Right for its time and with the courage to focus on true market development.  The brand and the business will have grown in parallel, creating self-fulfilling momentum.  There will have been an overwhelming obsession with the relevance of the idea and recruiting people to engage with it.  Loyalty earned from the quality of the idea and product.  Brands and revenue grow or stagnate in synch.  You need real momentum to leapfrog an equity and establish leadership with the consumer.  Equally when your brand is mature and lacking ideas you will have myriad micro-activities with no meaningful underlying impact to sales volumes or brand equity. 

Second, the origins will often revolve around a founder or a leader with vision. While it can be tempting to pigeonhole these leaders as idea experts, their success is rooted in how they acted on the idea.  It is how they decisively, tenaciously and consistently pursued the idea that mattered.  The clarity described above was just the foundation.  As you look at the detail of how it was built, you will appreciate it was likely with far, far less resources than you enjoy today.  The scarcity culture provoked innovation in how the business ran and a culture of learning by doing.  Opportunism will always be key in big growth stories and if you have limited resources you are forced to dive in and figure it out.  Passion, focus and persistence overcomes process and functional skill gaps.  While any business necessarily professionalizes over time the benefits of that ultimately become self-defeating and in mature organizations process paralysis sets in, limiting growth.  Learn from how your business built.  Clarity combined with limited resources.  Such a contrast with the abundance we all enjoy today, backed up by sophisticated technology, data, systems and processes.

The third idea builds from the first two.  At peak performance there is usually the clearest possible definition of the business model.  Today, you may have corporate mandates, functional initiatives and long business unit project lists.  In the heyday there was probably one clear business model focus.  Only.  It will have been rooted in a genuinely innovative, often functionally superior product.  It would have had breakthrough marketing at its core.  The magic formula of an idea big enough to grow markets and a brand strong enough to change consumer behavior.  The team would have been pursuing and delivering very high CAGR growth, stretching and innovating core business processes across the supply chain.  There will be true partnering stories with key customers, working together to grow the size of the pie.  Very little else would have got any focus.  If you can ever get the information on the headcount, you’ll be amazed at the productivity of that business model! 

A foundation to learn from and a provocation to your own growth transformation as you get started.   Clarity of the core idea.  Scarcity of resource to drive action and innovation.  A single-minded business model that created leapfrogs on the activity systems that matter. Nurtured, invested in, stretched to the limits and a true legacy created.