Strategists
A strategist isn’t someone who sits around inventing ideas.
A strategist isn’t someone who advocates for this year’s marketing trends.
In StrategyComics, a strategist has one job:
To clearly and simply identify what an audience would genuinely love to engage with from a company, then turn that truth into something actionable.
There’s always a lot of data that comes into the StrategyComics system. A lot. Strategists make sense of it all, think through every opportunity that comes from that data, then systematically whittles them down to the best ones for their audience, and makes them very easy to understand.
Not by leaning on trend data, fabricating ideas or, worse, generating them… but by helping customers see what is already true, then organizing that truth into something coherent enough to build upon.
What StrategyComics strategists do
StrategyComics strategists turn the outputs of the coaching sessions into the strategic material and identified opportunities that go into StrategyComics.
The first strategic responsibility is identifying patterns in the coaching data, and summarizing behaviour for the data pages. This means reviewing session worksheets and ID ouputs to identify recurring themes, dissonance, customer priorities, and signals that inform the opportunity pages.
The second strategic responsibility is using those data pages to produce opportunity pages throughout the whole StrategyComic. Opportunities exist at the intersection of platform, education, and entertainment. Strategists need to methodically work through all of the possible opportunities based on each intersection, whittle them down based on customer data, then wrap the winning opportunities with engaging livery so they’re memorable to readers.
The third strategic responsibility is accurately portraying how each opportunity should look and function — even in this idea state — to StrategyComics artists. This is so each idea can be illustrated in the StrategyComic for maximum reader clarity.
What strategists are not allowed to do
Just as StrategyComics strategists follow structured systems for producing strategic clarity, they also maintain clear boundaries around what not to do.
Examples include inventing unsupported conclusions, forcing fashionable marketing ideas upon customers for their own sake, allowing complexity into the system unchecked, ignoring customer evidence, producing vague writing, or presenting assumptions as facts.
The strategist’s job is not to sound impressive. It’s to make the buyer experience plan measurably clearer, and stronger, and more engaging for those it will serve.
Clarity is part of the job
Customers do not buy strategy because they want overwhelm and confusion.
They buy strategy because they want easy, enjoyable progress.
A good strategist removes ambiguity.
A good strategist identifies opportunities customers will genuinely enjoy engaging.
A good strategist makes advanced strategy feel easy.
Clarity isn’t a nice-to-have, aside from the core strategy discipline. Clarity is essential to what makes our strategies effective in the first place.
Strategists work inside a system
StrategyComics strategists contribute to the StrategyComics system, then run the system. They do not make things up on the fly: that would be reckless.
The extraction systems exist for a reason.
The ranking systems exist for a reason.
The writing structure exists for a reason.
The opportunity frameworks exist for a reason.
The blueprint structures exist for a reason.
The calibration systems exist for a reason.
The strategist’s responsibility is to execute that system skillfully, thoughtfully, and clearly. Any tweaks to our process are done via the system, not spontaneously in the middle of producing live StrategyComics.
This is important because it means customers receive a consistent experience, quality remains high, sessions remain structured, strategy remains coherent, there are no bottlenecks, and teams know what to expect from each other for a flawless production pipeline.
A great strategist is not necessarily the one with the biggest idea-muscle or the longest tenure in the marketing world. A great StrategyComics strategist is someone who reads carefully, thinks clearly, knows the system, reduces confusion, genuinely cares about helping customers, respects the process, respects the customer, and values clarity, consistency, and customer outcomes more than personal ego.