It is budget time again, that time of the year when planning comes to the fore, usually as an added job that is just a pain in the rear.
There is an easy way, and a hard way.
The easy way is to download a template and get the intern to spend a day filling in the gaps. About as useful as an umbrella in a cyclone.
Better than nothing, but only just.
Then there is the hard way, because it takes time, and requires you to use your brain, and the collective brains of others, and can be an emotional as much as analytical exercise, requiring time, energy, critical thinking, and collaboration, and making some really challenging choices.
Let’s define what we mean by marketing, useful if you are going to plan for it.
My definition of marketing is the ‘generation, development, leveraging and protection of competitive advantage’.
Not a definition you will find in any textbook, but mine evolved over 40 years of doing this stuff.
Competitive advantage evolves, and comes in many forms, but without it, you are in a commodity, price driven market, and you cannot win in that. The pace of evolution is these days frenetic, so writing a plan, and leaving it on the shelf for an occasional reference before the next budget session is useless. It has to be an evolving document.
If you can find a template that helps you do that, let me know.
Marketing is about the future, you are trying to shape it, so you are dealing with unknowns that can be qualified, but rarely quantified. With the use of various mental models, cause and effect, domain knowledge, customer intimacy, competitive understanding, tactical agility, and a whole range of other things, you can build a level of confidence that justifies the risks being taken.
It is a jigsaw puzzle, to which you do not have the picture, and many of the pieces you do have are wrong, and many are missing, so you have to experiment, make up your own, use someone else’s cast-offs, try making your own pieces to fit.
At the end, it is about making choices with imperfect information.
That is hard.
When faced with a choice that appears to be between two sub optimal outcomes, step back, and find another way. That is in itself a valid choice, and a very good one, and it makes you think.
The greatest two problems most corporates have in planning marketing are:
Extrapolation.
Confirmation bias.
Add 3% to last year, and, only seeing what they want to see.
That is what you get when you use a downloaded template in place of using your brain to critically assess options, information, domain knowledge, capabilities, resources, risk, and market and trend sensitive indicators.
