StrategyComics Chapter 1: Foundations

Behind every great movie, book, and marketing campaign… is a great foundation.

A clear roadmap that ties everything together.
Something to get all teams aligned and clear.
Something to be the north star of execution.
Something to help you lead company growth.

StrategyComics Foundations helps define the customer, the brand's role in relation to the customer, and each marketing function needed to make discovery, evaluation, conversion, nurture, transaction, activation, retention and referral run like clockwork.

All while making all that feel simple, clear, easy to remember, and easy to apply.

What Foundations is for

Foundations is for understanding the core strategy beneath the buyer experience.

It answers questions like:

Foundations answers these questions so all ads, posts, pages, emails and other assets can sing from the same hymn sheet, resulting in a much stronger buyer experience.

Why it comes first

You can make ads, pages, emails, onboarding, and sales material without Foundations.
Perhaps you've been doing that for years already.

And if you have, you'll likely already know how every marketing asset risks telling a slightly different story:

We instinctively know this is suboptimal.

We know it would be so much better if the entire process was a continual, integrated, orchestrated experience — each step building upon the last, drawing customers in with eager anticipation of what happens next.

We just tend not to know how to plan out such a thing.
That's what Foundations is for.

Who Foundations is for

Foundations is useful for companies that have a good product or service and prior interactions with their target market, who want to level-up their buyer experience to grow their brand and better serve their customers.

Good fit:

Bad fit:

What happens inside Foundations

Foundations is delivered through a mix of coaching sessions and comic page updates.

Each session extracts a specific part of the puzzle live with a StrategyComics coach, then the StrategyComics strategists and artists turn those inputs into clearly written and visually engaging material between sessions.

Session 0: Map and Rank (Optional session)

For brands with existing marketing materials who would like to rank their current performance before starting the Foundations process. Here, we plot current materials onto a proper buyer experience map, identifying where the gaps are, and how well each asset ranks in pulling power.

Session 1: Characters

We clarify who the customer is, and who your brand is, as if they were characters in a story. We define them with the same components as one would in a movie, to fully understand their motivations and behaviors, both individually and in relation to one another, so we can more deeply understand each of their roles in the customer journey.

Session 2: Narrative

We clarify the customer's problem, the desired future, and the steps they need to move through in order to move from one place to the other. This map becomes the territory upon which every marketing function sits.

Session 3: Attention

We clarify where customers already spend their attention, what they naturally notice, and what kinds of ideas, formats, stories, and visuals are most likely to earn their attention. Rather than trying to force attention through interruption or trends, we identify your customer’s existing habits for learning and for entertainment, then design ways of combining the two together to distinguish your brand as a winning source of both in places of meaning for them.

Session 4: Invitation

We clarify how people would appreciate moving from borrowed attention into owned brand experiences. This means defining the invitation that makes someone want to leave the platform they're on, visit the brand’s website or owned space, and continue the journey there in a deeper or elevated state. We look at what promise, curiosity, value, or next step would make that move feel natural and worthwhile, rather than asking people to click away merely for the brand’s convenience.

Session 5: Nurture

We clarify how the offer should be understood, trusted, and considered… how customers would appreciate going deeper with their invitation insights… and how to use one as a bridge to the other. The goal is to make nurture feel like a valuable continuation of their interest, helping them feel increasingly clear, confident, and ready to take the next step.

Session 6: Post-Sale

We clarify what should happen after purchase so customers succeed, return, and talk about it. This includes the initial moments after buying, the early wins customers need to experience, the moments where they may need reassurance or guidance, and the opportunities to create retention, expansion, referrals, testimonials, and champions. The buyer experience does not end at the transaction; the post-sale journey is where the promise is either fulfilled, strengthened, or quietly weakened.

What customers receive

Customers receive a fully illustrated comic book that presents the insights and opportunities uncovered during the 1:1 coaching sessions.

StrategyComics strategists turn the session inputs into clear strategic material. StrategyComics artists then illustrate those ideas so the final artifact is easy to read, share, remember, and use.

Each section of the buyer experience is written up as a suite of insights, and corresponding opportunities to execute are illustrated and explained for each section.

The entire experience is wrapped in a comic book story to help readers understand how everything fits together, while making it easy for your whole team to remember and recall in future, as a common language during execution.

What happens after Foundations?

With your StrategyComic Foundations in hand, you now have a complete map of your entire buyer experience — how people will progress from one stage to the next, from first contact through to being a brand advocate.

At this stage, companies have a choice.

The first option is to iterate upon their existing marketing materials using StrategyComics Foundations as their guide, intuiting how to implement each opportunity into each stage of their buyer experience.

The second option is to blueprint a specific phase of the map before production begins, so they can see precisely what to make, write and do for each post, page and email for the best customer experience, the best marketing results, and the most economical production.

Both are valid paths, and its the business owner's responsibility to choose what they believe is best for their business. The right choice depends on the scale of change required, how ambitious the opportunity is, and how much the company wants to "figure it out as they go" vs "plan the work and work the plan".

Path 1: Small improvements using Foundations

Some companies simply want to improve existing materials gradually, feeling it out as they go. For example, they might like to refine existing pages by tweaking their messaging, positioning and visuals. Or tighten existing onboarding. Or modify existing nurture flows. Tweaks and changes, using their Foundations as a north star while they figure it out.

In these cases, many companies simply use the Foundations StrategyComic internally as guidance while making those smaller changes, or use our Otherworldly Alliance Pay-As-You-Go service for a la carté production support as and when they need it, or a mix of the two.

This path is lighter-weight, faster to start, and works well when the existing infrastructure is already relatively strong.

Path 2: Blueprint a buyer journey phase properly before production

Some companies simply want to execute upon the opportunity in front of them, and want to get it right without wasting time or money on missteps or hoping that "figure it out as we go" works out. Instead of making various tweaks, they want to properly design stages of their buyer experience before production begins.

In these cases, this is where StrategyComics Blueprints come in. Blueprints zoom into one phase of the buyer journey and turn it into a detailed implementation schematic before production starts.

This dramatically reduces production ambiguity, fragmented decision-making, revision loops, patchy experience, and wasted production time or dollars.

Similarly, it typically increases implementation clarity, production confidence, the quality of the finished result, and value per dollar of production time.

This path is easier because there’s nothing to “figure out” during production. The thinking has already been done. Teams simply follow the blueprint.

Choosing a Blueprint

Blueprints are produced in phases that match the structure in StrategyComics Foundations, so companies can choose to blueprint only the pieces they want to blueprint. This increases speed to production while saving them money. Both are good things.

Most companies build what they need, when they need it. Some only Blueprint one phase, others Blueprint the entire buyer journey over time or up-front.

There is no pressure to take any one path over another. Blueprints exist to make bringing your ideal buyer experience to life as easy as possible.