What is Stratejoy® and how can it help your business win?

Most businesses have a strategy for pretty much everything these days. There’s the overall business strategy, probably a growth strategy, definitely a marketing strategy, hopefully some kind of brand strategy, and now of course everybody needs an AI strategy before somebody in the boardroom starts getting twitchy.

All of them are trying to answer some version of the same question: how are we going to win?

Stratejoy® asks another one.

How are we going to make people feel?

Because for all the time, money and brainpower businesses spend thinking about what they do, what they sell and where they’re going, remarkably few have an intentional strategy for the emotional experience they’re creating along the way. And I think that’s a pretty big omission.

People don’t experience businesses as strategies, systems or PowerPoint decks. They experience what it’s actually like to deal with you, and ultimately how they feel about you when you’re not there to tell them how brilliant you are.

That feeling has commercial value.

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So, what exactly is Stratejoy®?

Stratejoy™ is the idea that joy can be a commercial strategy.

And when I say joy, I don’t mean beanbags, forced fun, Hawaiian Shirt Friday or sticking a smiley face on the annual report and declaring the business joyful. I mean deliberately working out where creating a better human feeling could genuinely make a difference, then designing more of that feeling into the way you communicate, behave and show up.

But “be joyful” isn’t much of a strategy. It’s a nice instruction to put on a wall, but it doesn’t tell anyone what to do on Monday morning.

The useful question is: what kind of joy would make a difference to the people you serve?

For a founder, it might be the joy of finally seeing their messy ideas come together into something they can explain. For a new employee, it could be walking into a room and knowing they belong there. For a customer, it might be discovering that something they expected to be a complete faff is actually wonderfully easy.

There’s joy in making progress. In being recognised. In having more freedom than you thought you did. Even in looking at something you’ve built and feeling quietly proud of it.

Those feelings are all different, which is precisely the point. Stratejoy™ is about choosing the ones that matter to your people and giving your business a better chance of creating them, on purpose.

There is some rather lovely evidence for taking this seriously. VML found that 49% of people are likely to buy from brands that bring them a sense of joy, compared with 26% who say the same about brands that simply do what they say they will. Even better, 70% said they couldn’t remember the last time a brand did anything that excited them.

In other words, people want more feeling from brands, and most businesses are leaving an enormous joy-shaped gap sitting there.

That’s not fluffy. That’s affectivity.

Most businesses are understandably obsessed with effectivity. Did it work? Did somebody click the thing, buy the thing, and did we make some money from the whole thing? All very important.

Stratejoy® puts another question alongside it: how did it make them feel?

Because how somebody feels about an experience can influence what they remember, what they recommend, whether they return and, ultimately, what they choose. That is why I think joy deserves to move out of the “nice to have” column and into the commercial conversation.

I call the competitive edge you create by making people feel something your competitors don’t your Affective Advantage™. It’s where emotional difference starts becoming commercially useful.

And then, of course, somebody has to make all this real.

Enjoyneering™ is the practical side of the idea: deliberately designing that better feeling into the experience, rather than leaving it sitting in a strategy deck looking pleased with itself.

Perhaps this matters even more as we hurtle headfirst into the age of AI. Businesses are going to become extraordinarily efficient. We’ll write faster, analyse faster, respond faster and automate things we probably haven’t even thought of yet. Brilliant. But if everybody has access to increasingly similar clever stuff, efficiency itself becomes less remarkable.

Something very human becomes more valuable.

How you make people feel.

Your competitors can copy your products and features, adopt the same technology and use exactly the same AI tools. But a business people genuinely enjoy dealing with, built through hundreds of interactions over time, is considerably harder to nick.

That’s Stratejoy®.

It gives your business strategy, growth strategy, marketing strategy and brand strategy something more human to work towards. Something people can actually feel.

Because maybe the question businesses should be asking isn’t simply: how are we going to win?

Maybe there’s another question that needs to sit right next to it.

How are we going to make people feel?

Joy isn’t necessarily what happens after you win.

Joy might just be why you win.

More joy. On purpose.

Source: VML, The Age of Re-enchantment.

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