Every autumn, the number arrives. It comes from the board. Or headquarters. Either way, it lands on the team’s desk: “Grow by 7%. Improve margins by one point. Gain two points of market share.”
Nobody spends much time discussing the target. The energy goes into figuring out which initiatives will deliver it.
It’s hard to imagine approaching the problem any other way. After all, that’s how many of us were taught strategy in business school: objectives first, then the initiatives needed to achieve them.
Brand teams gather around the table and ask what appears to be the obvious question: “What should we do to get there?”
The trouble is that almost every initiative can make a perfectly reasonable business case for itself. That’s when the shopping list begins: more innovation. A packaging refresh. Better retail execution. Sustainability. Shopper programmes. And, inevitably, something on AI.
Marketing isn’t alone, of course. Sales is building its own list. Revenue management has another. Finance, supply chain, IT and HR are doing exactly the same. Every function builds its own list and every team feels reassured when its favourite projects make the final plan. The growing list is reassuring too. It feels ambitious. It feels comprehensive.
Someone eventually looks around the room and realises that no organisation could possibly execute everything on the list.
The solution? Maybe we should launch another programme to simplify everything. Or at least a prioritisation workshop. The irony is hard to miss.
The problem, however, isn’t poor planning. It’s that we’ve started with the wrong question. The organisation isn’t behaving irrationally. It’s simply following the logic built into the planning process itself.
How to agree on the problem
During my years at BCG, clients often came to us with objectives: help us grow in Asia, or help us accelerate innovation. Our first job was rarely to answer those questions directly, but to identify what was actually standing in the way.
Every strategy project revolved around identifying what we called the ‘nut to crack’: the one issue that, if solved, would unlock everything else.
This is where strategy becomes real work: ruthless diagnosis. The difficulty isn’t finding solutions, it’s agreeing on the problem.
In one recent project for a juice brand, we resisted the temptation to jump straight to solutions. Instead, we asked: what was holding the brand back?
It took time. Eventually, one uncomfortable insight emerged.
For years, the brand had relentlessly communicated one simple message: “Nothing but water and fruit”.
Consumers believed it. That was precisely the problem: if our product was simply water and fruit, why should shoppers pay a premium? After all, a private label could surely mix water and fruit just as well. Years of well-intentioned communication had unintentionally weakened our value equation.
Once we understood that, the strategy almost rewrote itself.
Several projects disappeared. Innovation was no longer about launching more products. It became proof of the brand’s expertise in blending fruit. Advertising stopped celebrating ingredients and started celebrating the blend itself.
We didn’t simplify because we’d become better at prioritising. We simplified because we’d finally agreed on the core problem we were trying to solve. From that moment on, every major decision pointed in the same direction.
A shopping list grows by addition. A strategy grows by elimination.
Strategies don’t fail because they contain bad ideas. They fail because they dance around the real problem instead of confronting it.
François Bazini is former CMO at Suntory Beverage & Food Europe
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