Every person on the planet has a frame through which they view the world, built on their life experience, education, background and interests. Unconsciously we all bring these biases into the process of planning our businesses.
If you ask an accountant how to best address the climate crisis, they will give you a response that has an accounting and numeric base, ask the same question of an ecologist, economist, entomologist, or marketer, and you will get different answers, informed by their own unconscious biases.
So, how do we filter them out of our planning, which almost all of the time focusses on the opportunity, the impact of our innovation?
Business planning while having a place for risk assessment, always in my experience lends it far less weight than the opportunity.
In order to ‘de-bias the plan, ask yourself three questions, the first of which is strategist Roger Martin’s claimed most important question:
- What would have to be true? This forces you to consider the drivers of success in the situation being addressed in the plan.
- What future event could sink the plan?
- What would help us if the plan does sink: i.e., what is plan B that avoids commercial demolition?
Anticipating competitive action and planning to accommodate the impact is a necessary part of every plan. This is perhaps the most common failure amongst marketing plans I have seen, including my own.
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 40 years ago, and there was not the wide choice we have now. We developed a halfway product we called ‘Cerola Light and Crunchy.’ I wrote a marketing plan that had as its first step a test market in Adelaide.
In that plan, well thought out and detailed as it was, I failed to sufficiently consider any of the three questions.
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, and we retreated, recognising the reality that we simply did not have what it took to poke a bear and expect to get away unscathed.
I never made that mistake again, and the only consolation I have is that ‘Just Right’ has survived and prospered, so at least my marketing logic was sound.
I do not agree with the conclusion in the header cartoon that you should roll over and play dead in the face of bear-like opposition. However, it is true that if you poke a bear, you had better do it in such a way that you have some sort of advantage that they cannot replicate.
Header cartoon credit: Tom Fishburne at marketoonist
