Stellar® Strategy Architecture

The design kit for business differentiation

The key responsibility of top management and the C-level leadership teamis widely recognised as defining and implementing strategy. An effective strategy is a coherent set of interlocking principles deriving from insights about the core identity, purpose and competency of the firm (amongst other aspects) in relation to customer needs. This gives powerful marketing and business advantage with brand positioning as fundamental aspect.

Identity-based strategy mobilises and optimises the business model, provides clear and explicit guidelines for product, service and communication design, and gets everyone working together.

Stellar® is a unique tool to assist this, enhancing returns for all stakeholders. It provides a comprehensive, robust and incisive guide for managers and staff through its inclusive and intelligent design, as well as better and more consistent customer solutions and business returns. And as the examples show, it works.

For example, the Centre for Integrated Marketing paper alongside shows how Stellar highlighted the strategic gap between Centrica and the AA months before the AA was demerged (see link 'How Stellar identified that the AA did not fit with Centrica' in side panel).

Pinpoint identity

Stellar is based on the latest research into integrated marketing and the aligned, customer-oriented corporation. Through a series of workshops, supported by appropriate research, the leadership team and its management identifies, understands and commits to the 12 organisational design principles that are the defining elements of identity and unique value and give highly practical leadership guidance to the firm/brand. Leaders and mangers understand the special (and non-arbitrary) relation between these leadership elements (as briefly indicated below) and how to use them to manage more effectively.  The 12 principles precisely pinpoint strategy and identity.

The animation shows the 12 Stellar® co-0rdinates and the wealth of precisely articulated relationships, including polarities, quadrants and each with all the others.  Click on it to see the image slightly larger.

The Stellar co-ordinates are an integrated wheel of precisely related identity elements

Stellar forms a coherent wheel: its 12 co-ordinates are precisely related like the elements of a clock, or the cycle of a colour wheel. There is only one right position for each co-ordinate, just as each colour or hour can only be in one place. And like complementary colours there are many special relationships between the Stellar co-ordinates.

Stellar benefits

Stellar® model of brand uniqueness is a key tool for helping leaders to manage and lead:

• Develop more powerful strategy for competitive advantage
• Enhance human resources policies (better understanding, more inspiration, more motivation, more integration between brand/marketing and HR)
• Design better products and services (you give the developers a vastly better brief)
• Improve production processes and quality of service and product (whereas lean minimises waste and cost, Stellar® identifies, focuses and optimises ‘rich’ core value)
• Save costs (cut out waste, focus on what matters; inspire productivity; motivate)
• Develop powerful integrated marketing strategies (managing the corporate brand from inspirational idea to customer consumption)
• Ensure growth strategies leverage identity and adjacencies (better choice and implementation of new product-adjacencies and/or new corporate acquisitions and mergers)
• Improve investment, evaluation and finance strategies (identify the unique, critical business metrics and drivers and use them to evaluate financial decisions, policies and key business metrics)
• Develop more powerful integrated communications (understand what makes you different and the real value you create; provide agencies with more incisive and helpful briefs)
• Empowering and powerful governance, broadly reconciling shareholder equity and corporate social responsibility (your unique value system is the principal shareholder, moral and ethical guideline).

Stellar® examples:

KB49

Tesco and Waitrose

Nokia managers' toolkit This is a large 1MB file illustrating Stellar in detail

For more information on Nokia, visit their website at www.nokia.com

For more on the background, applications and methodology of Stellar® follow this link

Stellar is a registered trademark and the Stellar architecture & definitions are copyright 2003-6.