Growth needs focus

Businesses have no shortage of possible routes to growth. There are more customer signals to analyse, more audiences to reach, more channels to use and more products, propositions and markets to pursue. Yet more possibility has not created more clarity; if anything, it has made clarity harder to achieve.

For many leadership teams, the central growth challenge is no longer identifying opportunities. It is deciding which ones matter, where the business has a credible chance of winning and what deserves disproportionate investment.

The challenge, then, is getting alignment behind where growth is going to come from, finding enough focus to make the choices that a whole business has confidence to commit to, and invest in going after.

Focus is an act of choice

Strategic focus is more than agreeing a list of priorities. It requires a shared view of where value exists and where the business should concentrate its resources.

That means deciding:

• which market and cultural differences matter commercially
• which opportunity areas deserve greater attention
• where the organisation has a true advantage
• what the business will deliberately choose not to pursue

That last choice is often the hardest. Most organisations are comfortable discussing what they want to do. Fewer are willing to define the boundaries of their strategy. But unless a business has unlimited resources, it cannot pursue every opportunity with equal commitment.

A growth strategy without boundaries is less a strategy, more an accumulation of ambitions.

Focus therefore requires more than identifying attractive opportunities. It means placing deliberate bets, concentrating investment and accepting that some possibilities will receive less attention, even when they appear valuable in isolation.

Abundance can fragment direction

More information and more opportunity can make those choices harder.

Different teams may hold different views of where growth will come from. Marketing, commercial, customer, innovation and product functions can each find evidence for the opportunities they favour.

The result is activity without a sufficiently shared direction.

Investment is spread across too many initiatives. Propositions are broadened to accommodate competing priorities and the interesting edges become blunted to appeal to wider audience groups. Teams optimise their part of the business against different definitions of the opportunity.

Greater precision and more information can improve execution, but it does not automatically create a clearer strategy. Businesses still need a manageable, intuitive and commercially meaningful view of an opportunity around which people and resources can align.

Create a shared structure

Businesses need a way to sift through complexity and swathes of data to find meaningful themes and groups.

Those groups might come from differences within categories, trends, audiences, needs, occasions or markets, depending on the growth question. What matters is that the distinctions and groupings created are commercially useful and give the organisation a shared basis for making choices.

This is the role that segmentation can play, although the term itself often comes with baggage. It is still frequently associated with large, slow, analytically heavy projects which produce static audience profiles or personas used mainly for marketing and communications. Yet the core of segmentation is not a methodology, it is simply about creating strategically meaningful groupings, whatever the underlying basis. Deployed well, it is perfectly placed to simplify complexity and give the business a shared framework for making choices.

At its most valuable, it helps leaders answer questions such as:

• Where should we play?
• Which opportunities should we prioritise?
• What should we stop doing?

The right structure of that framework depends on the choices the business needs to make.

In that sense, segmentation is not only a marketing or communications tool. It is a strategic business tool that supports an organisation in how it thinks about growth, allocates resources and aligns behind a common direction.

The value of segmentation is not simply in the groups it creates, but in the choices those groups enable.

The real question is where to focus

The important question is less whether a segmentation of audiences, categories, occasions etc. exists within the business, and more whether the organisation has successfully aligned around a shared view of where growth will come from, what really deserves attention and what it is willing not to pursue.

Without that shared view, more data, more opportunities and more activity can pull the business in different directions reducing decisions to short-term tactics. With it, leaders can make clearer choices both short and long-term and concentrate the organisation behind them.