Handling Multiple Objectives

Does your brief template say "objective" or "objectives"? Why?

I'm a big advocate of singular objectives in strategy. In my strat training, I begin with an acknowledgement that we all get briefs from internal or external clients which have a wish list instead of a single objective. Which leads nicely into: clarifying the objective is the first step in doing strategy.

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My advice is very simple and logical. If we have multiple objectives, we need to reduce them down to a single objective. There are five possibilities:

1. Some different objectives are related to each other hierarchically – that is, there's actually a "this is what success is" objective and there are other supporting "if we succeed in this, it will contribute to the objective" sub-objectives.
2. The actual objective might not be there, and instead there are numerous co-sub-objectives which are all laddering up to the same unnamed objective.
3. Some objectives are better treated as constraints. That is, we're trying to achieve our actual objective, but it won't be considered successful if we break these other criteria.
4. Some objectives are better treated as nice-to-haves, and so might help us choose between possible strategies later, but are not really what success looks like for this task. They don't define success or failure.
5. And if the above doesn't sort it out, the separate unrelated objectives require separate strategies.

This approach works almost all of the time. And it's worth doing, because if you agree to a brief with multiple objectives you've not pushed back on, that's on you. It opens the door to disagreement on whether or not you've succeeded. But long before that, it complicates the fuck out of the immediate next stage of strategy – identifying the issues relevant to your objective.

Thought experiments and extreme examples can be useful for teasing out the differences between an objective, a constraint and a nice-to-have. Imagine you're an agency planner given a brief to launch a new product. You've helpfully provided the client with a template to fill out for the brief, and they have dutifully filled it out. Here are a few of the fields:

The Brief in Brief
Launch the new XMount RideBlast e-bike with a PR stunt.

Objectives

• Drive awareness of the new RideBlast e-bike
• Earned reach through PR
• Brand love for XMount
• Understanding of RideBlast's new quick-replacement battery technology
• Clicks through to RideBlast website
• RideBlast sales within first six months

Well, you gave them a template that said "objectives" instead of "objective" – what did you expect? It's Christmas, and the only limit on fitting more wishes into the list is the font size.

Now, at a glance, I can tell a few likely things from this list. Brand love for XMount is likely a nice-to-have, because it is so different from all of the RideBlast objectives. Website visits ladder up to driving understanding. Driving understanding ladders up to sales. Driving awareness ladders up to sales. Earned reach through PR ladders up to driving awareness.

What kind of questions would I ask the client to tidy this up? Extreme thought experiments.

• Imagine we drove high awareness without any PR at all – would that be success?
• Imagine we drove understanding without any clicks to the website – would that be success?
• Imagine we drove hundreds of thousands of website visits from people who will never buy an e-bike – would that be success?
• Imagine we met your sales target within the first six months without any broader market awareness at all – would that be success?

These kinds of extremes pressure-test the objectives. They're different ways of asking, "What do you realllllly want?" And in real life, you can't make assumptions about this stuff. When you find out that your client stakeholder championed the RideBlast website, suddenly you understand why they're so insistent that understanding requires website visits. When you learn that another agency has been asked to make a video ad in parallel with your brief, you understand why you're supposed to focus on a PR stunt.

But most of the time, there aren't any curveballs like those. Mostly a list of multiple objectives can be processed and resolved into a single objective along with some identified constraints and nice-to-haves. Time spent doing so is never wasted.

And this applies to all strategy, not just briefs for agencies or consultancies. This first step directs every other part of strategy. Identifying a singular objective makes strategy much easier – and nearly impossible if you don't.