How learning chess reinforced my love of strategy and strategic marketing
Earlier this year, my son decided he was going to teach me how to play chess.
Despite my initial disinterest, he not only managed to successfully persuade and teach me, but I even almost won a game against him...once!
As green as I am on the chess board, I have a deep appreciation for the time players spend learning various tactics, as well as the skilled practice of thinking through and playing out different scenarios.
Thinking strategically in marketing and business is a lot like a chess game, which is why chess is so often used to visually convey strategy.
In chess,
Players have to be cognizant of the big picture as well as each individual piece on the board (theirs and their opponent's)
Each piece has specific limitations, but whether they're strengths or weaknesses depends on the context of what's going on around them
It takes a keen eye to watch for the opportunities and threats that evolve as you play
Getting too clever and moving too fast can mean a hit to your pride as you lose key pieces on the way to checkmate
These elements of the game all have parallels in business and marketing.
What's the point of a strategy in business and marketing?
In business, strategy is about looking at the big picture of everything around you.
It includes consideration of your target market and the pain points you solve, where you are (both location wise and where you stand in the marketplace), economic conditions, policies, competition, market factors, internal resources, and more.
And all of these elements combined make up the context you need to thoroughly assess how you can take the right actions as a business.
Your business doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Not taking into account both the external and internal factors that might play a role in your marketing, sales, and overall growth is a naive way to operate, just like assuming your chess opponent will make the most predictable move each time it’s their turn.
Believing that things will work out exactly as you’ve planned without any setbacks or surprises (in business or chess) will likely result in quite the shell shock.
Planning and preparation gives you direction, confidence and clarity
Giving yourself time to research the market and your competition, as well as to analyze any additional data available to you, sets you up for the same kind of success that learning various tactics and methodologies for playing chess would.
This research and prep time allows you to evaluate the aspects of your business that will impact your action plan.
What are your goals for the year? What about the month or quarter ahead?
Where are you going to focus your efforts and energies? What products or services are performing well? Which might need to be reassessed or reimagined?
What resources (time, money, energy, employees, etc.) do you have available to commit to what projects?
Where do you need support? Will that support come in the form of additional hires? Automations? Intentionally saying no or removing platforms from your marketing plan?
Do you have the capacity to take on additional marketing endeavors? What purpose will these serve in terms of your overarching goals?
Thinking through your marketing plans from start to finish lets you see what makes the most sense in terms of time, money, and effort in reaching your business goals.
And doing so in advance prevents you from overcommitting, or falling into too much of a reactionary mode – making drastic changes or sudden pivots that aren’t in alignment with your true business goals and vision but are rather due to short-lived trends or irrelevant external pressures.
This knowledge then makes it possible to make decisions with greater confidence and clarity about what is truly worth the resources you have accessible to you within your business.
Be willing to evolve and shift as you learn
While planning and preparation can do wonders to set you up for success, they also aren’t the end-all, be-all.
You need to be willing to be flexible with your strategy and plans as you begin to take action and gather more information.
Keep your eyes and ears open, and watch the board!
While you don’t necessarily need to respond and react to everything that’s happening in the world, know that your plan will likely need to shift and evolve as you get feedback, or as changes in the marketplace impact your business.
Why don't more businesses take the time to prepare a strategy?
There are many reasons businesses don’t take more time preparing their strategy, but the feeling of movement seems most common among my clients.
We tend to value checking items off a list more than the act of thinking about what we're going to do before taking action.
This drive to get things done might be about urgency to bring in revenue, pressure from people in charge, not knowing where to begin with a strategy, or plenty of other valid barriers, often coming down to a lack of time and resources.
Strategy is an investment in tomorrow
Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, talks about the flywheel effect and the effort it takes to build momentum in business:
Picture a huge, heavy flywheel—a massive metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle, about 30 feet in diameter, 2 feet thick, and weighing about 5,000 pounds.
Now imagine that your task is to get the flywheel rotating on the axle as fast and long as possible. Pushing with great effort, you get the flywheel to inch forward, moving almost imperceptibly at first.
You keep pushing and, after two or three hours of persistent effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster, and with continued great effort, you move it around a second rotation. You keep pushing in a consistent direction.
Three turns ... four ... five ... six ... the flywheel builds up speed ... seven ... eight ... you keep pushing ... nine ... ten ... it builds momentum ... eleven ... twelve ... moving faster with each turn ... twenty ... thirty ... fifty ... a hundred.
Then, at some point—breakthrough! The momentum of the thing kicks in in your favor, hurling the flywheel forward, turn after turn ... whoosh! ... its own heavy weight working for you.
You’re pushing no harder than during the first rotation, but the flywheel goes faster and faster. Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort. A thousand times faster, then ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. The huge heavy disk flies forward, with almost unstoppable momentum.
Now, imagine that same flywheel coated in oil. You struggle to get traction because the surface is slick and smooth.
Time spent building a strategy could have prepared you for this flywheel that can't get traction. It would have given you the opportunity to make different choices that could have led you to a totally different flywheel.
When you're at the right flywheel in the right conditions based on your strategy, it's still a lot of work to build momentum. But once that flywheel starts to turn, it gets easier every time.
So, prepare yourself and your business using strategy, rather than aimlessly checking tasks off your to-do list.
Not only will this preparation save you time and effort down the road, it will set you up for greater success, and more wins (on and off the board).