Marketing article 2 – Marketing planning, pain or pivotal? (2 of 3)
Appropriate
It’s impossible to know, but likely most marketing plans are not read by their intended audience. That’s because they’re not appropriate for their objective and do not contain information the audience needs. It’s important to remember that marketing plans may be constructed to not only lay out the plan of action; the objective may also be to impress, to get buy-in, or just simply to communicate. The plan’s objective will dictate how the plan is created, constructed, and shared.
For example, we were engaged to develop a worldwide annual marketing plan for a software company. Part-way into the process we discovered that the real objective was not the usual “market domination” (which was actually possible in this case) but to position the Marketing function within the company as world class, and to enable Marketing to be seen as coordinating both sales and marketing efforts. These objectives radically changed our approach. The planning process became more inclusive and more internally focused, process definition itself became part of the plan, and how the plan was finally presented was critical.
A plan must also be appropriately detailed for the target audience. Does it tell the user what they need to know to do their part or make a decision? Or perhaps more pertinently, does it tell them too much? Marketing plans usually exist at different levels, from a corporate-wide plan, through business unit and product plans, to program plans and even further. Unless the plans are usable and appropriately detailed at each level, plans become disconnected and overall results suffer.
To illustrate, in our engagements the enterprise level marketing plans we create are not tactically executable. That’s because at the top level the planning objective is usually to define an overall strategy or series of activities to drive towards a high-level objective. Once we’ve agreed on strategy, then the next level of program or project planning, carried out as execution rolls, takes care of detailed task-level specification and direction.
Creative
The course decided at the planning stage determines the results the plan will generate when it is eventually executed. The best brains in the organization must be engaged in creatively responding to the challenges of defining a winning product and inserting it exactly into the marketplace.
Yet the creative aspect of planning is often overlooked. We’ve seen many organizations focused on developing a repeatable process for product launches. While this may work if cost containment is the objective, it does little for the development of a creative, all-new, marketing plan that will knock the socks off the competition. Plan 23 rev 9.2 may not work as well now as it did in Q3 last year.
Creative thinking is required to overcome the practicalities of marketing, the limits of your organization, and competition in the marketplace, and this is where most planning effort must be spent. Consider applying some simple techniques to foster creativity. While they may be uncomfortable at first for analytical types, they’ll at least jolt your thinking processes out of their usual track.(2)
Asking for input from a wider audience will sometimes result in good ideas, too. Those “dumb questions” are sometimes not so dumb. Or maybe bringing in fresh ideas from outside the organization may be the answer. Whatever you choose, make sure your planning process spurs you to think creatively about your marketing programs.
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