Sometimes the old sayings are the most valuable. How many times have we heard put the cart before the horse? Similarly, how many times have we heard when doing our forward marketing planning to focus on strategy before tactics. While, this seems well worn and blindingly obvious several key issues can cause us to unwittingly muddle tactics with strategy and not even realize our error.
The most common issue is the limited executive time usually allocated for strategic planning. In most corporate environments, the senior managers will either go away for weekend or set aside several days for planning. The lead manager usually the CEO or presidents focus is generally on having built group consensus and hopefully an actionable list /plan for the coming quarter, year or disignated time frame. As such there is an underlying pressure or tension to limit or eliminate indepth senario discussions based on possible conflicting futures in favor of a single agreed upon or given future outcome.
The problem is, reality with all its immeasurable variables can rarely be encapsulated into one well defined senario. Any one single plan will naturally be wanting. Secondarily, as job expertise and experience among manager is almost always grounded in their perspective fields of knowledge; finance, engineering, sales production and marketing, there is little commonly held assumptions that can be used as an unbiased measure of competing business problems and suggested solutions.
By and large, the biggest stumbling block for marketers is the failure to clearly define the brand attributes and objective goals as a group. Failure to determine what their brand's truly unique selling proposition is to the market they serve in particular the difficult to copy intrinsic and extrinsic qualities that make your brand special drives managers to default to tried and tested tactical action lists.
The danger of this group think tactical planning is that it fails to encompass the potential future gains and to navigate the pitfalls that strategic examination of multiple outcomes could provide.
One of the best solutions is to apply game theory to strategic marketing planning where outcomes could be scored for how many unique permutations the team could develop for a change in one or more internal or external variables. Simply put if we changed our warranty policy what are all the possible outcomes that could result. In this way, strategic advantages can be uncovered and a follow on plan or tactics will naturally unfold. So if you really want to make the most of your marketing planning always put strategic considerations before tactical action plans.
The most common issue is the limited executive time usually allocated for strategic planning. In most corporate environments, the senior managers will either go away for weekend or set aside several days for planning. The lead manager usually the CEO or presidents focus is generally on having built group consensus and hopefully an actionable list /plan for the coming quarter, year or disignated time frame. As such there is an underlying pressure or tension to limit or eliminate indepth senario discussions based on possible conflicting futures in favor of a single agreed upon or given future outcome.
The problem is, reality with all its immeasurable variables can rarely be encapsulated into one well defined senario. Any one single plan will naturally be wanting. Secondarily, as job expertise and experience among manager is almost always grounded in their perspective fields of knowledge; finance, engineering, sales production and marketing, there is little commonly held assumptions that can be used as an unbiased measure of competing business problems and suggested solutions.
By and large, the biggest stumbling block for marketers is the failure to clearly define the brand attributes and objective goals as a group. Failure to determine what their brand's truly unique selling proposition is to the market they serve in particular the difficult to copy intrinsic and extrinsic qualities that make your brand special drives managers to default to tried and tested tactical action lists.
The danger of this group think tactical planning is that it fails to encompass the potential future gains and to navigate the pitfalls that strategic examination of multiple outcomes could provide.
One of the best solutions is to apply game theory to strategic marketing planning where outcomes could be scored for how many unique permutations the team could develop for a change in one or more internal or external variables. Simply put if we changed our warranty policy what are all the possible outcomes that could result. In this way, strategic advantages can be uncovered and a follow on plan or tactics will naturally unfold. So if you really want to make the most of your marketing planning always put strategic considerations before tactical action plans.
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