The importance of objectives

Guy Murphy has a really interesting post on objectives over at the IPA Strategy Group’s blog. I personally find poor and restrictive objectives really frustrating. You end up spending too much time in ‘strategy’ meetings going round in circles, but more importantly it stops you from creating great work.

The way an objective is formed, presented and articulated can have such a major influence on the direction of a strategy. I agree with Guy, people should give it more attention. I’m always surprised by how often people fail to make a distinction between the different types of objective you may see in a brief such as campaign objectives, project objectives, business objectives, marketing objectives and communications objectives.

I love the analogy Guy has given: “If the objective set by Dick Fosbury in the high jump was to complete a perfectly executed Western Roll we would not have heard of him. A Western Roll is an interim measure of success. Instead, he set himself the objective of ‘jumping as high as possible’. Enter the Fosbury Flop. Not only did getting the objective right achieve a better result, it released creativity and freedom into the strategy”.

Working on a brief without a good objective is like playing football when you are a kid. Every time the ball gets kicked in a different direction everyone on the pitch runs after it with no purpose, other than to get the ball. You might win you might not. Only once you have decided on a match-winning objective can you play the beautiful game and not just win, but also win in style.

You can read Guy Murphy’s full post here.