At a time when many advertising folk have jumped from advertising into consultancy roles with the so-called big ‘cagencies’, Rory O’Rourke did the exact opposite. Now, one year into his role as strategy and innovations director with Dynamo, she shares some of the key learnings.
I joined Dynamo as Strategy and Innovation Director just under a year ago, at almost the exact moment the industry began publicly wondering whether that role still belonged inside agencies at all. WARC’s Future of Strategy report, published last October, found that 80% of strategists worldwide believe their discipline is at a crossroads, with higher-value strategic work increasingly moving to specialists. I read it and ended up going the other way.
A brief note on how I arrived here. I came into the industry through a circuitous route: market research, then brand consultancies, then advertising agencies, then a long period in management consultancy where I began training as an executive coach and worked in organisational culture and engagement. It’s an eclectic mix, but a useful one. The different rooms I have found myself in have taught me to listen for different things, and have given me a broader set of instruments to reach for when a decision needs to be made.
I understand why strategic work has, over time, been disconnecting itself from traditional agency models. I can see the arguments from both sides, having myself developed strategic work in isolation from execution. But ultimately I think the move toward fragmentation is the wrong answer to some real problems.
Brand does its most valuable work when it is treated as an asset used inside and outside the business at once. Externally, it helps shape the reputation a business earns in the market. Internally, it’s an organising principle: something people can use to know what to build, what to say, how to behave, what to accept and what to refuse. Working across that double life of a brand is where, for me, so much potential sits. It’s also what makes disconnecting brand strategy from a potential range of viewpoints, voices and skills problematic.
Bringing diverse disciplines together and combining it with an understanding of an organisation’s culture creates a deeper, more holistic view of what the brand needs to do. It’s a cliché to say that the world brands operate in now is more complex, but it also happens to be true. Faced with that complexity, one of the core jobs we have as partners to our clients is preventing the say / do gap; something that I think is harder to achieve when everything is fragmented and we baton-pass between each other.
This principle is shaping and changing how we’re working now in Dynamo. If I think about two recent examples, we’ve repositioned one of Ireland’s top corporate law firms, and we are right in the middle of helping to launch a new retail bank into the Irish market next year.
They are very different clients, but each time we applied the same philosophy. We worked closely with the senior leadership team to shape the ambition for brand. But alongside that, we engaged the wider organisation so different voices and perspectives could help inform and shape what the brand would become. It’s all well and good having a killer campaign, but the brand will live or die on whether the people inside the company can deliver on it. This is as much about energy and belief as it is about resources and capabilities.
It’s why we spend time drawing together multi-disciplinary teams not just from within our clients’ business, but our own one as well. This brings fresh and novel perspectives to everything from product development, UX, communications, the tone in a call centre script, or culturally how people can work together to solve problems.
We’ve found time and again that the great ideas come from the positive tensions that emerge between the diversity of views we corral throughout the work. I think strategy is ultimately strengthened when collaborative teams can throw stones at it, spot weaknesses and solve them together.
None of this is possible without the right disposition on all sides: a willingness to have your thinking pressure-tested by the people who have to execute on it. And I don’t just mean designers or copywriters; employees have to execute the promise too, and they are usually the ones who see first where it doesn’t hold up.
Which, ultimately, is why I feel something is lost in the trend of separating strategy from execution. Roger Martin argued this very point, fifteen years ago in the Harvard Business Review, that treating strategy and execution as separate activities rests on a false picture. Strategy lives, or dies, in thousands of small choices made by everyone working in and around the brand.
Separating the thinking from the doing looks neat on paper but in practice, it puts even greater distance between the people shaping the promise and the people tasked with keeping it.
