This is the key to strategy that is so often misunderstood and frequently missed—getting to the heart of the “How?” There are academics and practitioners who have their ways of revealing and identifying good strategy. Unfortunately, I have found them to be lacking in simplicity or even hazy enough to be misleading. Some, I would argue, almost purposely seem to make strategy identification complex for the sake of sounding academically superior on the subject. In their haste to give others a formula for strategy, they leave out something more valuable— teaching others how to think about strategy in the first place. 

In 1975, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a largely overlooked ruling that allowed earth-orbiting antennas—satellites—to be used for broadcasting television over large areas. Around that same time, a little-known regional broadcasting network called Home Box Office (HBO) took notice, and decided to use the FCC’s landmark decision to begin distributing its own programming via satellite. HBO simultaneously decided to provide, for free, large satellite reception dishes to dozens of burgeoning cable operators across the country, allowing them to distribute HBO’s signal to their own subscribers.

John C. Maxwell once defined a budget as this: telling your money where to go instead of wondering where it went. Maxwell was speaking of personal finance and budgeting, but there’s no reason to believe that with the bevy of media types and spending options that the same shouldn’t apply to marketing budgets.