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On the day he walked into the San Francisco 49ers’ headquarters in 1979, Bill Walsh was wearing pressed khakis, neatly combed white hair, and a professorial disposition. The only items missing from his ensemble were an elbow jacket and a curved billiard pipe. He certainly didn’t look like a soccer coach. He wasn’t acting like one either. He didn’t scream. He didn’t scream. He made no rah-rah speeches.

However, over the next decade, Bill Walsh would revolutionize football and build an NFL dynasty. In this way, he would also lay the strategic foundations for brands that are in competition almost four decades later. Bill’s idea was straightforward: put the ball where the other team isn’t.

For the half century before Bill’s arrival, professional football was played the same way. Big, strong linemen blocked big, strong running backs. Occasionally, the quarterback tossed the ball across the field to make sure the trenches weren’t overly overcrowded with linemen trying to stop the run. Teams won because of power and willpower. The differences in the team strategies were not discernible.

Brute strength and big budgets are not enough

This is analogous to how most brands have been built over the past few decades. Brute strength in the form of huge budgets and massive media purchases was the core of the playbook. Thanks to search, social media, and cellular, great brands are now being built, not bought. You cannot achieve a clear competitive advantage simply by outperforming the competition. It can work to create a good brand, but it doesn’t create a passion brand. That requires fundamentally different thinking.

Walsh’s thinking was based on the fact that the professional football pitch is 53.3 meters wide. He realized that this was an incredibly large screen and that most teams largely ignored the “flat” area of ​​the field, which is less than 12 meters deep but is close to the sideline. Bill decided to raise the width above power. When the two teams clashed at the border, famous quarterback Joe Montana threw the ball at Jerry Rice about six yards from the border. 60 percent of the mileage in passing games came from shipyards after the catch. This was a revolutionary change in tactics. A 12 yard pass was designed to create seven of its yards on the ground. Jerry scored more touchdowns than any other player before him. This seismic change in strategy has been labeled a West Coast crime.

However, the West Coast crime was a misnomer. It was started by Bill in the decidedly off-west coast city of Cincinnati. The Bengals weren’t a particularly strong team and were pushed around the field. Your quarterback, a clever and highly mobile player whom hardly anyone has ever heard of named Virgil Carter, had a weak arm. Bill knew he had to use Virgil’s fortune to cover his shortcomings. So he learned to put the ball where the other team is not. He had to rely on short passes. He had to use Virgil’s intelligence. He created games that lasted less than 3.5 seconds and took advantage of the defenses’ confusion through offensive postponements.

Most brands have a challenge analogous to a weakly armed quarterback, such as B. limited budgets or an undifferentiated product line. But they don’t need a weak quarterback to learn how to put the ball where the other team isn’t. A math formula can be applied. The creative canvas for brands is not limited to 53.3 meters wide. It’s practically unlimited. Thanks to technology, the only limitation is your imagination. It’s not always a good thing. Prioritization must take place so that resources are invested efficiently.

Prioritization with the opportunity index

The formula we use for prioritization is called the opportunity index. It enables brands to identify and mathematically prioritize the areas where they can be activated. The formula integrates the four key components of decision making for specific activations: importance, performance, differentiation, and cost. It enables brands to measure the potential upside potential and divide it by the resources required so that each opportunity has a comparable metric based on the potential performance and investment required.

It is not essential that the Opportunity Index be the exact formula brands use. Using the soccer analogy, each quarterback has a different style, but they all have the same goals for ball placement. Brands can use any formula they want, as long as they stick to a sustainable, quantifiable approach.

The specific formula for the Opportunity Index is as follows:

[(Importance – Satisfaction) Å~ Differentiation] / Costs

The numerator in this equation is the opportunity. To assess the chance for each potential point of contact, we measure how important it is. Then we subtract how satisfied the audience is with their performance. This approach is usually called gap analysis, but it is not sufficient in itself. Therefore, to differentiate, we adjust the result by a score that increases the counter when the opportunity is very unique. From there, we divide the total by the holistic resources required, including internal hours, supplier fees, and other costs. Based on the score, brands have a chronologically accurate way to prioritize activations. Because big ideas tend to cost more, the Opportunity Index is prioritized based on the order in which they are invested so that ideas with a large upward trend and relatively low cost are tackled first.

It is important to realize that the math formula is not as simple as pressing the button on a database interface. There are hundreds of places brands can activate, and many of the touchpoints just don’t exist for every brand. So the numbers for importance and satisfaction are based on strategic judgments. That’s why, despite the power of data and technology, big brands are still built by creative strategic thinkers.

Obtaining the measurements for these strategic assessments requires leveraging all of the available data points, including survey data, ethnographic studies, qualitative research, social listening, site analytics, search metrics, media metrics, social metrics, and more. Most of all, it’s about brand immersion – strategic planners who pounce on the consumer’s journey. We call this phase intelligence aggregation. It’s about using each dataset in conjunction with practical experience to create quantifiable amounts of importance, satisfaction, differentiation, and cost.

The most powerful component of the Opportunity Index is that brands can get rid of the machine and glossy objects mentioned above. It creates a mathematical basis for using other tools than traditional advertising. It also helps brands realize that the latest trends in the time and energy devoted to them are often overindexing. In the past few years, I’ve seen that it is most effective at helping brands understand how to create powerful mobile experiences. While analytics paralyzed many brands during the mobile revolution, brands using the Opportunity Index were able to identify key traits and functions to maximize ROI.

The role of long-term thinking

In order to place the ball where the other team is not, you have to think long-term. On the flight home after eight straight defeats, Bill’s demeanor was the exact opposite of what one would expect from an NFL football coach. He collapsed in his seat and cried uncontrollably. The coaching team circled their seat and casually ate peanuts to protect the team from the emotional breakdown.

Somehow, at the end of the flight, Bill rallied and continued to lay the groundwork for his revolutionary offense. As with modern branding, Bill realized that it would be a long-term effort based on internal behavior rather than just a strong external message. He introduced a standard of performance that dictated every detailed aspect of the organization’s behavior, right down to the way receptionists answered the phone and how the players put on their shirts. Bill didn’t have a schedule for winning a championship. Instead, he had “an urgent timetable for setting an agenda for certain norms of behavior – actions and attitudes – that apply to each individual”. He described the standard of performance as “a leadership philosophy that has just as much to do with basic values, principles and ideals as it does with blocking, tackling and passing on.”

“Winners act like winners before they are winners.”

Bill wasn’t entirely against the casual coach stereotype. One of the most important ones was, “Winners act like winners before they are winners.” So before setting his win / loss record, he focused on his standard of performance. Like brands who don’t get distracted by irrelevant marketing metrics, Bill knew that if he focused on the behavior of the entire company, the score would take care of itself.

Brands face precisely this problem. Audiences can see straight through messages to understand company culture and behavior. When brands don’t consider customer needs in the first place, audiences will feel it in the form of poor mobile usability, half-hearted customer service, uninspired merchandising, unfriendly return policies, and dozens of other triggers. You won’t just feel the friction. You will share it with others. Any positive and negative brand behavior has an exponential effect as consumers share on digital platforms. This is exacerbated by the fact that search engines and social media have algorithms that support and penalize brands based on digital traffic patterns.

Placing the ball where the other team is not will create an exponential performance curve for the 49ers. It took a few precarious years for the behaviors to win. They found themselves on the brink of disaster for a year or two as they focused inward before their behavior manifested as mastery. But when it caught on, it was practically unstoppable. It soon led to five Super Bowls and a seat for Bill in Canton, Ohio, in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. It has the same potential for you and your brand.

Contribution to Branding Strategy Insider by: Jeff Rosenblum and Jordan Berg, excerpt from their book Friction: Passion Brands in the Age of Disruption, published by powerHouse Books

The Blake Project can help your brand win from within: Please email us to learn more about our purpose, mission, vision and values, as well as our brand culture workshops.

Brand Strategy Insider is a service from The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in brand research, brand strategy, brand growth and branding

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