Balancing Long-Term Vision with Short-Term Pressure

A conversation with Ryan O'Connell, Chief Strategy Officer & Founder at Jnr. In this edition of Exec Edge, we sit down with Ryan — former CSO at Ogilvy and now founder of Jnr., an independent trans-Tasman creative agency — to explore how strategy leaders can maintain long-term brand vision while navigating the constant pressures of short-term results.

Below is our full Q&A, lightly edited for clarity and flow.

What does “long-term vision” mean in your role — and how do you keep it alive day to day? It’s mainly about helping to build brands for sustainable growth, rather than short-term ‘sugar hits’. Brand building has been proven to be the most effective long-term business strategy for brands, but that requires patience, commitment, and the ability to not get distracted or disheartened.

What kinds of short-term pressures most often threaten that vision? A lot of clients unfortunately need short-term ‘wins’, like immediate sales or revenue, in order to justify their budget, or even the role of marketing. Particularly to some C-Suites that don’t have the patience — or understanding — for long-term brand building. That, in turn, puts pressure on communications campaigns to achieve immediate results, when that may not actually be what’s in the best interests of the business/brand.

How do you make trade-offs when long-term priorities and near-term demands collide? I think you need to be realistic and admit that some (most?) clients simply do not have the time to wait for long-term effectiveness, and need some quick results. Therefore, cutting up the marketing budget in order to ‘have your cake and eat it too’ is a good trade-off. That means building a marketing plan that invests some money into achieving short-term results now, while also investing some (if not most!) in long-term brand building activity.

Have you found any tactics that help teams stay focused on the big picture while delivering quickly? This is going to sound super obvious, and that’s because it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong! But the best tactic for this is ensuring that the entire team knows what success looks like (both short- and long-term), how it’s going to be measured, when it’s going to be measured, and the strategy to achieve it. I’m prone to saying this a lot — probably too much! — but nothing provides focus better than clarity.

Can you share a time when short-term pressure forced a pivot — and how you navigated it? It’s become a bit of cliché to use the Covid pandemic, and the lockdowns many experienced, as an example of how quickly things can change and how quickly humans can adapt to a ‘new normal’. Yet I’ve never experienced greater pivots, and short-term pressures, than that crazy time in all our lives. For a number of brands that I worked on, every long-term goal was thrown in the bin — or at least put on pause – as the reality of serious short-term pressures and objectives really hit home. Like most people, I’m not sure I navigated it as much as I just survived it! Yet that was done by recalibrating what success looked like. The goalposts moved for everyone, and being able to adapt to that is how we all got through it. I guess what I’m saying is that flexibility and adaptability is a very good skill to have in strategy.

How do you communicate the long-term vision without sounding out of touch with current realities? I think the important thing is that any long-term vision needs to be attached to – or judged by – a long-term objective/goal. That helps make it tangible and not just some fluffy words on a page that don’t really mean anything, or have no relevance to the day-to-day. Any good strategy is essentially a plan to help achieve future goals via current actions/behaviours/decisions. Which is a long and wanky way of saying that a long-term vision should never be detached or “out of touch” with current realities anyway.