Building A POV Framework to Shape Your Business Model
Chapter Three: Principle 2—To Be Compelling Requires a Strategic Point of View
Dear Friends,
As with all of my book posts, you will need to read the previous posts in this chapter to understand the full argument for why building a framework for your strategic point of view is so important. You can find the outline for past posts at the end of this post.
And, again, please share this post with three people who need it!
Building A POV Framework to Shape Your Business Model
A point of view starts with a future-focused insight that helps you plan. I shared with you our point of view on brand loyalty.
Let me share another example of a point of view. During the 2010s, Stone Mantel was often asked by our clients to help them think about their omnichannel strategy. We did a lot of primary research through our Collaboratives and realized that while customers certainly wanted the seamless cross channel experience that omnichannel promised, the strategies that most companies were taking would not suffice. For a healthy percentage of the US population, the anticipated experience they wanted looked much more like what Apple Intelligence looks like today. (I wrote about that insight in another post. And I also wrote a book about it.)
Here's the simple framework that I created to describe the insight that guided our clients’ decision-making regarding omnichannel. It’s a progression framework that shows what comes after omnichannel.
The insight is: in the past people only had access to one channel, typically a store, theater, or newspaper. Then, because of computers, they experienced multiple channel delivery. But those channels were not connected. Today (actually, the insight is from 2015), companies are trying to make the experience between channels ‘seamless.’ But there’s a percentage of the customer base (45%) who already want something more (again, 2015 numbers). That something is digital context: a personal data-ecosphere that works across all of the customers tools, can assist them in making better decision, and is the next-generation unifying channel.
Now, once a company has a future-focused insight like the one above, they can start to focus on the implications for their business model. Most certainly, the insight can guide their channel strategy, but there’s more that it can do.
1. The insight can be shaped into a strategic point of view statement like the one I shared in the previous post.
2. That strategic point of view statement can then become the foundational plan to help the company lift the brand, drive innovation, allocate resources, train employees, and develop metrics.
A Framework That Describes and Prescribes
The insight that starts the point of view should, in most cases, be accompanied by a framework that “describes and prescribes.” Joe Pine loves to talk about frameworks that way. For several years, he’s led a framework building exercise for new members of the Collaboratives. He always says that the way to evaluate a framework is by its ability to describe what matters and prescribe what companies should do about it.
I can hear some experience strategists saying they have a framework and then pulling out the company’s persona. A framework is more than a description of who the customer is. A framework—especially one that explains a point of view—helps the company to understand the new paradigm or way of seeing the challenge. It describes behavior or decision-making. It demonstrates what is happening in the world or what is not. You can locate your company, your customer, or your decision somewhere within the framework. It describes the problem the company faces.
A great framework also prescribes certain decisions that the company should make. In the example I shared above, the framework shows that channel design doesn’t end with omnichannel strategies. Rather, companies need to start making decisions about how to create a personal data ecosphere for their customers. It shows the elements of a personal data ecosphere and predicts that at some point soon the customer will expect companies to create digital context strategies to support and engage people.
Let’s look at how different types of frameworks both describe and prescribe.
Some companies are reticent to create their own frameworks. They want tried and true frameworks that many other organization use. That’s fine for everything except your company’s point of view. When you create a strategic point of view statement, you almost always will need a framework that is based on that point of view to guide decision-making.
To be continued …