We all understand what a post-mortem is: an analysis of why something after the fact. It deals with history, then usually when something has failed. We review the drivers of success less often than examining the reasons for failure, then allocating responsibility.
Planning a marketing program is in effect a ‘pre-mortem’, a plan of action that will, with good management, robust analysis, and a bit of luck and timing, deliver the anticipated outcome.
Logically, it makes sense to ask the sorts of questions typically asked at a marketing post mortem, when a plan has failed, before the failure, as a means to anticipate and answer the questions, offering an opportunity to fix the problems before they happen.
Based on the many marketing pre and post-mortems I have done, following is a list of the 10 essential questions to ask yourself and your team before pushing that great big ‘Go’ button.
Where did the revenue come from?
Growth is not possible in the absence of revenue, where did the revenue come from, and almost every marketing plan I have ever seen calls for growth. Less often do they articulate where it will come from., and the consequential reactions of those who might be losing out.
Current customers, new customers, channels, business models, products, technical achievements, geographies, and so on. However, do not just list them, articulate in some detail how it has happened. Again, that past perspective adds real ‘grunt’ to the conversations.
I used to refer to ‘Share of Throat’ when planning for FMCG. It implies that competition is not just the alternative products in the category, but everything that is competing at the consumption occasions. For example, a hugely successful new product was Ski Double-Up, launched in the late eighties. It brought new consumers, older men, into the market. It did not compete for a place on the breakfast menu, it was a healthy, convenient, and tasty snack product that filled a need in older men that frankly we did not fully recognise before launch. It opened up an additional avenue into men’s throats replacing pies and sandwiches.
Where did the capital come from?
Growth is a veracious consumer of resources, particularly capital. How did you fund that growth? Reinvestment of retained earnings, capital raising from friends and family, or from the markets, public and private, debt finance considering the necessity for assets as collateral? What alternative uses for the capital consumed were considered, and why is the investment in marketing a superior choice?
What is the dominant business model?
Are you a middleman, retailer, on-line item sales, subscription sales, did you achieve a position to monetise arbitrage opportunities, and so on. Digital has delivered a host of new and emerging business models to us over the last decade, but one thing that has become clear, if it was not already, is that differing business models do not live comfortably in the same house. Therefore, if your revenue streams come from different business models, the structure of your resulting business needs to be decentralised by those differing business models.
What is the ideal corporate structure?
Have you remained private, are you publicly owned, a partnership, Joint venture, franchise system? There are many options, and as in the previous question, siblings rarely successfully live in the same house.
What capabilities were required to succeed, and where did you find them?
This is a question in two parts. Firstly, what capabilities were required from individuals, technical, strategic, financial, and all the other factors that make human beings able to contribute? Secondly, what were the organisational, leadership and cultural factors that enabled the organization to leverage the capabilities the individuals brought in each morning as they turned up to work.
Which customers, markets, products, technologies, relationships, were critical to the success? The answers to these questions are at a ‘must know’ level. Why did those customers come to you, choosing not to go to a competitor? What is the factor that differentiated you from the others?
Which competitors proved to be the most potent?
Anticipating competitive action, and planning to accommodate the impact is a necessary part of every plan, as noted previously. This is perhaps the most common failure amongst marketing plans I have seen, and to be fair, written.
A long time ago I was with Cerebos, one of the brands I managed was Cerola muesli, at that time a successful brand, and I was keen to expand the brand footprint. I saw a gap in the market between muesli and corn flakes, this was 35 years ago, and there was not the wide choice we have now. We developed a half way product we called ‘Cerola Light and Crunchy’ and launched a test market in Adelaide.
At first, we did remarkably well. The logic we employed was well accepted, the retailer sell in easily achieved targets, and consumer off-take was strong after the initial burst of advertising.Then in came Kellogg’s with a look-a-like product, ‘Just Right,’ and their resources just blew us away, Light &Crunchy never had a chance in the face of the weight of the competitive reaction by Kellogg’s.
That is a lesson I did not forget. With the benefit of hindsight, it was obvious, poke a bear in the arse and he is going to turn around and give you a whack, and I did not anticipate the power of it, and I should have. Never made that mistake again.
Where did the new competitors come from?
New competition almost always comes from the fringes, and often outside the normal scope of most extrapolative planning. Looking widely at what is happening in other markets, and other technologies may offer insights to where new, and probably more potent competition may come from. Honda started in motor bikes with the Honda 50, selling it to students in California as cheap local transport. None of the incumbents, Triumph, Norton, Harley, saw them coming, they thought they were toys, being bought by people who would never buy a big bike. Blockbuster ‘owned’ video, and could have bought Netflix for $50 million, but thought them irrelevant, not even an irritation. 5 years later Blockbuster was broke.
What is the emerging source of customer value in the market?
Nothing new will be bought in the absence of a strong reason to switch from the incumbents, which always means new value has been created, somehow. How did your create yours?
What did we do wrong, and what did we learn?
You learn more from your mistakes than you do from the things you got right. Make sure ‘learning is part of the cultural DNA of your business.
When you have the answers to all these questions, found with the benefit of the virtual hindsight, you will be in a very powerful marketing position, able to write the plans that double-down on the things that will deliver the objectives and success
In other words, execute the plan.
Header credit: Talisa Chang via Medium
