On Wednesday, as England prepared to play Argentina, EE made mobile data free for its Pay Monthly, PAYG and SME customers across the UK. It was reported as a generous customer offer. It was also a rather good demonstration of what strategy is supposed to do.
On Wednesday, as England prepared to play Argentina, EE made mobile data free for its Pay Monthly, PAYG and SME customers across the UK.
It was reported as a generous customer offer. It was also a rather good demonstration of what strategy is supposed to do.
EE is a connectivity business and the lead partner of the Home Nations Football Associations. At a moment when millions of people wanted to stream, message and follow the match, it changed the tariff so more of them could.
The clever part wasn't the free data. It was the coherence.
Most sponsorship works the other way around. A company buys an association, adds its logo and then asks marketing to explain why the partnership makes perfect sense. (This usually produces a sentence about shared values and, if circumstances permit, a limited-edition lanyard.)
EE allowed the partnership to change a business decision, and that's much rarer.
Companies often talk about making strategy understandable. This matters, obviously. But understanding is only the beginning — a strategy becomes useful when somebody outside the strategy team can apply it to a choice.
Should we remove this fee?
Should we build this feature?
Should we change the way we price, sell or serve?
A usable strategy helps people answer. It gives product, operations, finance and marketing a shared reason to choose one course over another. An unusable strategy gives them a PDF.
This is why so many organisations struggle to “bring the strategy to life”. It contains ambitions, pillars and themes, but no clue about what anyone should do differently on Monday morning. Communication is then asked to perform the small miracle of making it feel real.
So a film is made, a toolkit is circulated. Everyone agrees that the strategy is now very much alive.
The business carries on as before.
EE's decision was small and temporary, but it passed the more important test. The idea travelled far enough into the organisation to alter the product customers received. For one day, “keeping people connected” was not something EE said about itself. It was how the business behaved.
That is the difference between a strategy people have read and a strategy people can use.
One lives in the presentation. The other turns up on the bill.
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