The thread that holds your marketing strategy together

We think a lot about ’the red thread’.

The red thread joins your organisation’s objectives to its marketing and communications strategy to its tactical executions. 

The red thread should provide clarity inside and outside your organisation.

Clarity creates coherence, builds a sense of mission internally and ensures your external audiences have a clear sense of your organisation and what it can offer.

We believe that a clear red thread will help your organisation to deliver its objectives.

Yet often the thread frays - leadership, marketing and communications departments often appear misaligned. Messaging is confusing, media coverage is generated without appearing to have any strategic benefit, leadership is trained in performance over strategic communication.

There are a number of practical steps for marketing and communication leaders to take to define and protect the red thread withintheir organisation.

First, executive alignment - get time with leadership, marketing and communication to align on the objective and strategy for the year ahead.

Second, create a foundational narrative for theorganisation and what it wants to achieve. All marketing and communication should beginwith this narrative - as an example, thequestion to ask should be ‘how do we get our narrative into media?’ and not ‘how do we get media coverage?’

Third, with full understanding of audiences, marketing and communication teams can create their own tactical plans - but focussed on the delivery of the narrative. This constraint should inspire more creative campaigns.

Fourth, ensure that spokespeople and leadership are trained as much on thenarrative and the communication objectives as they are on communication performance.

Fifth, align measurement in marketing and communication with the delivery of thefoundational narrative.

Get in touch if any of this resonates.