Musings of a Marketing Maven

It must be the sea­son for mar­ket­ing plan­ning. Recently I’ve got­ten mul­ti­ple requests for point­ers on how to develop a great mar­ket­ing plan – even from my spouse who’s in a mar­ket­ing strat­egy role for a major wire­less company.

My ref­er­ence library was packed away, due to an office remodel, so I launched a Google search – and was under­whelmed with what I found online. There’s an amaz­ing dis­con­ti­nu­ity in the resources avail­able: a chasm between the tra­di­tional con­tents of a mar­ket­ing plan and the impli­ca­tions of the online/interactive arena, ecom­merce, and the pres­sure for mea­sur­able, account­able vehi­cles for mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties. (Need­less to say, the gap between what’s pub­licly avail­able and what’s needed is one of the rea­sons why com­pa­nies engage con­sul­tants like me.)

Here are some of the issues.

Hard to Find What You Need

Either pun­dits are nar­rowly focused on aspects of the Inter­net domain and tend to ignore what’s hap­pen­ing in the real world, or they’re tra­di­tion­al­ists and focus on the 4 Ps with­out clar­i­fy­ing how the 4 Ps should be rein­ter­preted for the Inter­net era. Tra­di­tion­al­ists’ ref­er­ences to online or mobile-enabled mar­ket­ing are often miss­ing alto­gether, sim­plis­tic or so badly out of date as to be mis­lead­ing. As for mar­ket­ing ROI – the sub­ject tends to be tack­led in books ded­i­cated to mar­ket­ing metrics.

This leaves today’s smart mar­keters scram­bling to fig­ure out how to bridge the gaps between these domains, or to syn­the­size the best of these approaches in mean­ing­ful ways. It’s not easy to find holis­tic resources.

I was look­ing for an all-inclusive resource that I could rec­om­mend to clients and so far, have failed to find one. For the moment, a use­ful (and largely tra­di­tional) resource for mar­ket­ing plan­ning  is Mar­ket­ing Plans That Work by McDon­ald and Kee­gan. It offers a good overview of the process to fol­low and the core con­tents of a strate­gic mar­ket­ing plan. Hav­ing said that, ignore what they write about the Inter­net for mar­keters – it’s way too lim­ited and out-of-date. And the sub­ject of per­for­mance mea­sures – key met­rics for mea­sur­ing mar­ket­ing ROI – is largely miss­ing from this resource.

What About Scorecarding?

Some of my tech clients have devel­oped Strat­egy Maps and Bal­anced Score­cards for mar­ket­ing plan­ning; how­ever, they tend to focus on the score­cards and under-invest in the hard work of devel­op­ing a clear and log­i­cally coher­ent Strat­egy Map.

In the tech world the score­card frame­work is com­pelling because it links strate­gic ini­tia­tives (what we’re going to do) with per­for­mance mea­sures (how we’re going to mea­sure progress, and the cri­te­ria for deter­min­ing what suc­cess looks like). Some­times ini­tia­tives are also linked to time­frames and bud­gets, which aligns the strat­egy with the needs of oper­at­ing plan­ning. This increases the chances that exe­cu­tion will be on target.

I’ve seen a num­ber of client-confidential exam­ples of this plan­ning frame­work in use, but have not read any pub­lished arti­cles or books on how to apply this approach more gen­er­ally to marketing.

As prac­ticed today, I see risks in jump­ing to score­card­ing as “the new way” to do mar­ket­ing plan­ning, if it means aban­don­ing some of the foun­da­tional plan­ning activities.

Because there’s no place on the BSC tem­plate to sum­ma­rize key find­ings from the sit­u­a­tion analy­sis, mar­ket­ing plan­ning teams may fail to do their home­work ade­quately. They may skip the time-consuming intel­li­gence gath­er­ing and hypoth­e­sis form­ing work that pre­pares the team for key strate­gic deci­sions: how to respond to changes in the mar­ket envi­ron­ment, exploit com­pany capa­bil­i­ties, or improve the com­pet­i­tive posi­tion via changes in the prod­uct offer­ing, value propo­si­tion, seg­men­ta­tion model, go-to-market, etc. They may fail to clearly artic­u­late their core assump­tions or to define the most impor­tant things to do in the face of uncertainty.

And if the Strat­egy Map isn’t rel­e­vant to the sit­u­a­tion, log­i­cally con­sis­tent and action­able, there’s high risk that the score­card will be an ele­gant plan­ning frame­work that misses the mark.

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