A helpful tip and shortcut for understanding any strategy is to boil it down to a single sentence.

Get [insert target audience] to [insert a specific action] by [insert a description of the plan] because [reasons to believe this plan will work].

Ok. Granted, it’s a mouth full but you get the point. This reduction of the strategy is useful when clients need to grasp the strategy quickly and briefly. What I like about it as well, it pulls out the most important points to make a quick assessment of the coherence of the strategy. It can help me answer the question, “Why should I believe this strategy makes sense? ”

Also, it’s been a helpful technique to capture the complete, albeit cliff notes version of a business case study. For example, I finished Customer Centricity Playbook by Peter Fader and Sarah Toms. In it, they describe the customer-centric strategy that Best Buy and Amazon employed to great success.

Here’s how I summarized it with GTBB:

Best Buy Customer Centric Strategy:

• Get women and smart-home customers

• To buy from Best Buy (vs. Amazon)

• By encouraging showrooming + shipping, price matching, and offering in-store services like Geeksquad

• Because a study found that 55% of the company’s business came from women who sought more than simply the cheapest product. Rather, this highly valuable customer segment wanted help from knowledgeable staff who could assist them with assessing the comparisons, purchasing ancillary products, and, in many cases, providing in-home installation. And with technology becoming increasingly complex with products that integrate multiple devices via the Internet of Things, Joly also recognized an emerging demand for more expertise in product services from male and female customers alike. Indeed, smart-home integrated devices have been the fastest-growing class of customer electronics in recent years.

The book claims that as a result of this strategy,

Best Buy’s stock price shot up from $10/share in December 2013 to more than $70/share at the close of 2017, indicating further robustness by gaining 50% in value in 2017 alone.

Amazon Customer Centric Strategy:

• Get relatively affluent, educated shoppers

• To buy from Amazon

• By selling them books online

• Because sales to these customers provided infinite opportunities to mine information about the behaviors and untapped potential of a highly valuable segment of online customers. So books are a gateway drug to selling them everything else. Plus, books could be shipped without breaking.

As a result:

Amazon was able to light the path to finding and acquiring throngs of other online customers with similarly high lifetime values.

Just remember GTBB.