StrategyCAD™ Strategic choices canvas

Winning aspirations: The foundations of value and excellence

Understanding Winning Aspirations:
Aspirations articulate the core purpose of a business and define what success looks like. They are rooted in the desire to provide superior value to customers and stakeholders.

Importance of Winning Aspirations:
Winning aspirations lead to market share gains by striving for excellence. They foster a competitive advantage by instilling a culture of striving for the best. Focus shifts from products to customer needs, defining the true business essence.

Key Principles for Business Leaders:
Aspirations are the bedrock of business excellence. Success is defined by creating superior value and delighting customers. Winning aspirations require a commitment to excellence and tough choices. Aspirations should foster an environment that seeks innovative ways to serve customers uniquely.

Examples:
Starbucks: Beyond being a coffee business, it's about creating urban relaxation and meeting spaces. Telecom Companies: Not just about telecom services, but enabling connections and access to information.

Understanding Business and Customer Aspirations:

1. Customer Aspirations: Reflect the reasons for the business's existence in terms of customer benefits. This is central to defining business purpose and strategy.

2. Business Aspirations: Focus on stakeholder needs, and enablers of the customer aspirations encompassing, one or more of:

   • Product leadership.
   • Operational efficiency.
   • Financial success.
   • Environmental sustainability.
   • Unified and engaged teams.
   • Being the most rewarding place to work.

Interplay of Business and Customer Aspirations:
Business aspirations should be enablers for fulfilling customer aspirations. Aligning internal success drivers with the needs and expectations of customers.

Identity Statement

Our Core Identity

Placeholder: [Your Business Name] is a [type of business] committed to [core principles/values]. Our identity is rooted in [what the business stands for] a nd is directed towards our customer and business aspirations.

Our Guiding Values

Placeholder: We prioritize [Value 1], [Value 2], [Value 3], etc., which inform our relationships with customers and our business practices. These values dictate [how it's reflected in actions].

Principles

Placeholder: Our conduct is guided by principles such as [Principle 1], [Principle 2], [Principle 3], etc., which ensure we operate in a way that aligns with our aspirations and the expectations of our stakeholders.

Aspirations Alignment - Fulfilling Our Aspirations

Placeholder: Our identity, values, and principles are in harmony with our customer aspirations [insert customer aspirations] and business aspirations [insert business aspirations], guiding us to [explain how they drive the business towards its goals].

Behavioral Expectations of conduct:

Placeholder: In embodying our identity and upholding our values, we anticipate our team to demonstrate behaviors such as [describe expected behaviors and actions].

Our Commitment to Stakeholders

Placeholder: We are dedicated to our customers, employees, and partners and pledge to maintain [outline the commitments based on identity, values, and principles], as this is intrinsic to achieving our shared aspirations.

A Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy is a cohesive mutually supportive set of choices with a subsequent action plan that specifies how a company will reach target customers and achieve competitive advantage. The purpose of a GTM strategy is to provide a blueprint for delivering a product or service to the end customer, taking into account such factors as what needs or pain points will be resolved, for who at what price and via what distribution.

This section of the canvas encompasses considerations necessary for a initial launch phase but also those necessary to sustain and grow your market position over time. It includes a detailed understanding of:

• Industry Analysis: Identifying the broader market and the specific segment you aim to target, such as women's fashionable sportswear within the sportswear industry or luxury SUV's within the EV motor vehicle industry.
• Market Opportunities: Assessing the potential and opportunities in your chosen segment, including geographic considerations.
• Market Threats: Recognizing and preparing for potential threats and competition.
• Value Propositions: Defining the unique benefits and reasons why customers should choose your product.
• Customer Segmentation: Understanding the different groups within your market, considering how accessible those groups or segments are the position and messaging strategies for each.
• Purchasing Personas: Crafting detailed profiles of your customer roles in the purchasing process e.g. Influencer, decision maker, etc.
• Customer Messaging: Developing clear and compelling messaging that resonates with your target audience.
• Product Strategy: Determining the products to offer and how they fit into the existing market.
• Pricing Strategy: Choosing a pricing model that aligns with your market position, Pricing strategies include: penetration pricing, price skimming, value pricing and what relative price the business is positioned in the market e.g. budget, differentiated, premium, mass market.
• Promotion and Brand Strategy: Deciding how to promote your products and the messaging that will build your brand.
• Marketing Channels: Selecting the most effective channels to reach and communicate with your audience.

By integrating these elements into a cohesive plan, your business can effectively define how it will reach and serve your target market, while differentiating from competitors and capitalizing on market opportunities.

"How We Win" is a framework for articulating the strategic choices that will give your company a competitive edge. This section of the strategy canvas helps define the unique elements that enable your business to delight your target customers in ways others cannot to secure a winning position in the market. These elements include:

• Competitive Advantage: Clarify your unique value proposition, the reasons customers will choose your offerings over the competition and and how your business will sustain its advantage in the markets it plays.
• Core Competencies: Identify the distinctive capabilities, knowledge, and resources that underpin your strategy and distinguish your business.
• Key Partners: Detail strategic alliances or partnerships that strengthen your market position and enhance value creation.
• Performance Gaps: Acknowledge and address any shortcomings that may impede your ability to compete effectively.
• Customer Journey: Map out the process that guides potential customers from awareness to purchase, ensuring a smooth transition at each stage.
• Value Delivery Chain: Examine how different departments work together using frameworks like Porter's Value Chain to deliver superior customer value.
• Costs: Define the primary costs associated with your strategic choices and how they affect your overall financial strategy.
• Revenue Models: Explore diverse revenue streams such as transactional, subscription, or licensing models and how they align with your business objectives.

Integrating these elements into a coherent strategy ensures that your business not only knows where it plays but also how it wins in those chosen markets and segments. This clarity of strategic intent is critical for aligning resources, actions, and decisions across the organization.

Executing and sustaining a strategy is about translating strategic choices into actions and ensuring they remain relevant over time. This section focuses on sustained and sustainable and relevant strategy execution and encompasses:

• Situation Assessment: Evaluate the current state of the business relative to its aspirations and strategic decisions.
• Diagnosis: Identify and understand the core challenges that are holding the business back.
• Guiding Policy: Outline the overarching approach for addressing the challenges identified in the diagnosis.
• Coherent Action Plan: Develop a detailed plan to implement the guiding policy and address the diagnosis.
• Risks: Identify potential risks and devise mitigation strategies.
• Innovation Pipeline: Plan for future innovation to maintain competitiveness.
• Strategic Conversations: Engage in ongoing discussions about unmet consumer needs, strategy comprehension within the organization, competitive landscape, market trends, technological advancements, capability gaps, performance reviews, risk assessment, progress of strategic initiatives, and necessary adaptations.

The "Execute and Sustain" phase ensures that the strategy is not only implemented but also continuously reviewed and adapted to meet changing market conditions and internal capabilities. It involves a dynamic process of action, feedback, and refinement to maintain strategic alignment and drive ongoing relevance, adaptation and success.

Here you can provide details about who your key partners and suppliers are, and what resources or benefits you acquire from them.

Market Response and Adaptation

By filling out this section, a business can create a dynamic strategy that evolves with market conditions and feedback, ensuring a responsive and agile approach to market challenges and opportunities. The "Market Response and Adaptation" section is crucial for understanding how the market receives a product or service and what adjustments are necessary to improve market fit and performance. Here's a breakdown of the types of content that might fit into this component:

Market Response Metrics

• **Sales Metrics:** Total sales volume, sales growth rate, average purchase value, product performance, and customer acquisition costs.
• **Marketing Metrics:** Conversion rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and the effectiveness of different marketing channels.
• **Customer Feedback:** Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction surveys, product reviews, and customer service inquiries.
• **Market Penetration:** Market share, penetration rate for different customer segments, and usage rates.
• **Financial Metrics:** Profit margins, return on investment (ROI) for marketing campaigns, and cost per lead.
• **Operational Metrics:** Inventory turnover, supply chain efficiency, and production costs.

**Adaptation Response:**

• **Product Adaptation:** Changes to the product based on customer feedback, new versions, feature additions, or removals.
• **Pricing Strategy Adjustments:** Dynamic pricing, discount strategies, bundling, or value-based pricing adjustments.
• **Promotional Adaptations:** Altering marketing messages, changing advertising channels, or adjusting campaign targets.
• **Distribution Changes:** Expanding or narrowing distribution channels, changing suppliers or logistics partners, or adopting new sales platforms.
• **Customer Relationship Management:** Introducing new customer service protocols, loyalty programs, or personalized communication strategies.

Market response metrics managed

In the "Market Response and Adaptation" section, a business leader would place:

• Sales Volume and Revenue: This is the most direct indicator of market response, showing how much is being sold and the revenue generated.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The cost associated with acquiring a new customer, which helps in understanding the efficiency of the GTM strategy.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total worth to a business of a customer over the whole period of their relationship. It's important to compare CLV to CAC to ensure long-term sustainability.
• Conversion Rates: The percentage of leads that turn into customers, which indicates the effectiveness of the sales funnel.
• Win Rate: The percentage of deals closed compared to the number of proposals given.
• Market Share: The portion of the market that the business captures, indicating the competitiveness of the product in the chosen market segments.
• Churn Rate: The rate at which customers stop doing business with an entity. A low churn rate indicates high customer retention.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): A measure of customer loyalty and satisfaction.
• Product Usage and Engagement Metrics: These include daily active users (DAU), monthly active users (MAU), and session duration, which can be critical for services and digital products.
• Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI): The financial effectiveness of marketing activities.
• Time to Market: The time it takes for a product to go from conception to being available for sale.
• Product Return Rate: For physical goods, this indicates customer satisfaction and product-market fit.

Adaptation

<>Product Enhancements: Adjustments to features or the creation of new versions based on user feedback and engagement data.
• Pricing Adjustments: Tweaks to the pricing model in response to sales volume, revenue, and market share data.
• Marketing and Sales Strategy Modifications: Changes to campaigns and sales approaches based on conversion rates, ROMI, and win rates.
• Customer Experience Improvements: Initiatives to improve NPS and reduce churn, informed by customer feedback.

Pricing patterns

• COGS - price based upon recovery of fixed and variable costs
• Competitor based - price based relative to competitors
• Value based - price based on the value to customers

Pricing strategies

• Penetration pricing - Low introductory price to gain market share.
• Price skimming- initial high price during launch of new innovative product then reduce price over time.
• Premium pricing - price based on the differential high value gained from the product e.g. Luxury cars, iPhone
• Value based pricing - charging what the customer is willing to pay or pricing based on the value the customer obtains e.g. % of savings, usage based pricing

This choice dictates the playing field: the target markets, customer segments, product categories, and geographies in which the business will compete to fulfill its aspirations. It also outlines how the business will go to market either as a go to market launch or sustaining a winning presence in a market. It involves making choices about where it can compete, add value and recieve a return on allocated resources.

Performance gaps

Identifies aspects that may hinder the ability to achieve the customer and business aspirations and can include a variety of elements, such as:

Weaknesses are typically looked at as areas that require improvement, restructuring, or strategic decision-making to mitigate their potential negative impact on the organization's success.

• Resource insufficiencies (financial, human, technological)
• Lack of competitive capabilities or advantages
• Inefficient processes and systems
• Poor brand reputation or market perception
• Deficient customer service or consumer engagement
• Limitations in product or service offerings
• Internal operational problems e.g. weak market focus, purpose fragmented value delivery chain

Identifying weaknesses or gaps allows an organization to develop actions to improve or manage these areas effectively.

This section is dedicated to defining the primary approach your business will use to engage with the market and deliver value to customers. It outlines the dominant go-to-market style, whether it is product-led, marketing-led, sales-led, or customer-led, and details the strategic implications of this choice. Leaders should articulate how this approach will influence product development, customer interaction, sales processes, and marketing campaigns. This framework is the lens through which all market-facing decisions should be viewed to ensure alignment and coherence across business functions.

Why clarify and understand this choice

• Strategic alignment

  Clarifying the dominant go-to-market strategy ensures that the subsequent choices are aligned with the overarching approach. For example, if a product-led growth strategy is chosen, the focus would be on refining the product features and user experience rather than on building a large sales force.

• Resource optimisation

  dentifying the primary go-to-market style can help a business leader allocate resources more effectively. Each style requires different investments, be it in product development, marketing, or sales personnel. Knowing the style from the outset can lead to more efficient budgeting

• Consistency of execution

  Having a clear go-to-market strategy can ensure consistency across various functions of the business. For instance, product development, marketing, and customer service will all operate with a common understanding of how the product or service is being positioned and sold in the market.

• Decision making framework

  A dominant go-to-market style serves as a decision-making framework for leaders. It helps in prioritizing initiatives and making choices that support the chosen go-to-market method, whether it's deciding on features, marketing channels, or sales tactics.

• Measurement and metrics

  The chosen go-to-market strategy will influence the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that the business tracks. A product-led growth strategy might focus on user engagement metrics, while a sales-led strategy might prioritize pipeline growth and closing rates.

• Market messaging

  The go-to-market style affects how a company communicates with the market. Identifying the dominant style up front helps ensure that messaging is coherent and reinforces the chosen strategy.

• Talent acquisition

  Knowing the go-to-market strategy can guide talent acquisition. A marketing-led strategy may require hiring experts in digital marketing and content creation, while a sales-led strategy might necessitate experienced sales professionals.

• Customer experiences

  The go-to-market approach will affect the entire customer journey from awareness to purchase and beyond. It's essential to define this approach early on to ensure a seamless customer experience.

To ascend to market, product, or innovation leadership, a business must not only perform the requisite activities but also embody the distinct ethos of a leader in its domain. The 'Identity and Values' section crystallizes the essence of the business—defining the core identity and the values that steer its conduct, alongside the principles that underpin this conduct. By ingraining these elements into the company's DNA, the business ensures that every action aligns with and advances its aspirations, carving a path to true leadership.