Story Telling: Red Thread Tool

Story Telling: Red Thread Tool

🔥 The marketer is a story builder and story teller. Being able to 'market' our strategic plans internally is as critical a skill as to acquire clients externally via stories in advertising and promotion. Compelling narratives foster collaboration, communicate vision and values, inspire and motivate people, and prepare them for what's to come.

The Red Thread Tool
The Red Thread tool is a visual storytelling model that helps one to summarize the thought process, logic, and flow of any strategic or tactical plan.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE AND FINANCIAL OBJECTIVES: Understand the business, your brand's role in the portfolio, and financial goals. Use situation analysis and other strategy tools to study context, category, competition, consumer, channel and company. Identify the facts and consequences of these factors on business. Quantify the financial objectives.
KEY ISSUES: Identify the areas that will drive revenue growth. Use tools like SWOT in this step. Aligning Key Issues means the whole business agrees on the focus for marketing activity.
MUST WIN MOMENTS IN CUSTOMER JOURNEY: Pinpoint the key moments along the journey where we need to focus. Identify and prioritize using segmentation techniques and customer journey.
CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS (CSFs): Identify the critical implications for achieving our goals. Use the Bridge tool and Get (What) To (Achieve What) By (Tactic) Tool.
STRATEGIES TO OVERCOME CSF BARRIERS: How we'll overcome the barriers identified in our Critical Success Factors formulates the key strategies.
PERSONAS AND TRIGGER POINTS: Define Personality of your customer segment, identify the trigger points to align tactical matrix to the trigger points. Tactical matrix when implemented will help you achieve bigger picture as framed in strategies.
KPIS TO TRACK AND OPTIMIZE TACTICS: Every tactic should have monitoring KPIs, to track the ROI.
EXCELLENCE IN EXECUTION: How you ensure all the stakeholders are aligned to the bigger plan. No matter how good a strategy is, but if not executed well, it can prove disastrous for a brand.

The red thread tool also helps to ensure our story or plan is linear and takes the listener through a logical communication of our strategy.
In planning, the red thread moves the user from the challenge a business is facing to key issues, must win moments and critical success factors – as a way of setting up the logic for our strategies.

If we keep the red thread tool in mind while creating our strategies, we can create compelling stories around the brands.
Source: Corporate training 'Marketing Plan Development'