Finding A Winning Marketing Strategy                                          

Senior business people spend a lot of time wondering about both their business and their marketing strategies. Have they analysed the market correctly? Have they understood their position within that market? Have they chosen the correct path to commercial success? And how often should they revise their plans in the face of changing market conditions?

Marketing Consultants are permanently engaged by clients to help answer these questions. They can offer an independent voice to the decision-making process which can become focussed on a particular, but incorrect consensus. Consultants can also give an up to date picture of what other leading businesses are doing to answer the same questions.

However, while a Marketing Consultancy can offer a short-term boost or correction to the current strategic approach of a business, the longer term answer to these questions will only come from increasing the ability  of the senior team to craft strategy. This ability can be learnt, and if it improves, the business will be confident in it's own ability to respond to whatever the market throws at it in the future.

In order to think about what constitutes a good marketing strategy, it is worth considering why poor ones are created.

1   The plans are not created by the right people

It is a universal truth that everyone has an opinion on marketing and that they all love to be involved in marketing decision making. In some organisations, this can mean that marketing planning is done by a central group of senior people who are not best placed to do so for several reasons. Firstly, they are distant from the customer and so are not good judges of what works and what does not in their market. Secondly, established senior teams are often base their judgements on a consensus of opinion which is heavily based on what worked in the past. They are over-confident in their ability to keep pace with their markets. This is often as a result of a poor ability to challenge each other over fundamental beliefs about the business. Involving people from outside the consensus is the solution to this problem. If these teams want to avoid a permanent reliance on marketing consultants, then they need to widen to group of people who participate in crafting the marketing strategy.

A second source of problems is that commercial wisdom in most organisations is help by both the marketing and the sales teams. The traditional antipathy between these two groups means that fruitful dialogue on issues as broad as a marketing or a commercial strategy will rarely emerge from internal processes. In organisations where a matrix structure is in place, the situation can be almost impossible to resolve. Too often in these cases, a few powerful characters will dominate any debate, and most contributions will go unheard. As well as the emotions involved and the obvious power struggle, the fact that these teams speak a totally different language means that a meaningful dialogue rarely exists.

These are two specific examples of why people close to the customer  do not contribute to the marketing strategy in the way that they should. In every organisation, these and other problems exist. The challenge for the marketing leadership in every business is to keep those furthest from the customer, furthest from the plan. They must also provide a climate where there is enough dialogue within the entire commercial team, to make the most of their market intelligence.

2   Plans are fixed and immovable

A general once said that no battle plan survived contact with the enemy. It is worth keeping this in mind when your marketing plan is created. It must be seen as a current view on how to reach an objective, given a particular set of circumstances. The objective seldom varies significantly, although this is not impossible. However, regular reviews are required to discuss both sales performance and any changes in the market. In this way the plan is viewed as an evolving program which changes when it needs to. A marketing strategy is working when it is delivering results and when it is informing business decisions about how to compete effectively in the current market. If sales performance is below expectations, or if there is a lack of clarity about how to compete in the market, then the plan needs to be revisited.

An effective way of coping with significant changes in a market environment, is to use contingencies. These are generated by assessing the key impacts that are likely to impact a business, such as a recession, a cyclical change, a political upheaval, or an environmental disaster. A good test of an organisations maturity in crafting strategy is their ability to anticipate the more important changes by looking at trends and seeing where the fault lines lie. This common understanding is the backdrop to all decision making for teams that are effective in crafting strategy, and it simplifies and speeds up decision-making without sacrificing quality.

Effective senior teams are also able to commit fully to a marketing strategy and while bearing in mind the changes that might be necessary should an important event occur. Adequate scenario planning and regular reviews are the key processes to flexible plans, however they will come to nothing if the people involved don't have the right abilities.

3   We Plan In February

In some organisations, crafting a marketing strategy happens as part of the strategic planning cycle and that is treated in the same way as the dreaded annual audit. A timetable is published by some external person, and at the busiest and most inconvenient time of the year, the senior team have to stop working in the business to produce and present their plans to those better paid than themselves.

At it's worst a plan is produced an lies on a shelf while everyone gets on with things. Just slightly better is the case where planning is not an iterative process. Mistakes made in the past are repeated every year. Take for example, a business which is weak in sales forecasting. It plans, then runs campaigns. Sales are lest than expected so activities are modified to make up the shortfall. But the plan is not modified and the weakness in forecasting is not addressed. Next period the same problem will occur and effort will be again diverted to fix the symptom and not the disease. It sounds silly, but this is a common problem for organisations.

If businesses are forced into a fixed cycle which delivers a poor marketing strategy, then the leadership of the business needs to run a separate process which isolates decisions on the marketing strategy, from the process which produces the shelf-filler for head office.

4   Good marketing strategy - shame about the execution

We already described how a strategy needs to deliver sales performance. At performance reviews it is important to analyse sales performance and to isolate what is creating any shortfall.

   - Has the teams view of the market changed?
   - Is the marketing strategy still the best way to compete in the market?
   - Is there a full set of tactics in place to deliver the marketing strategy?
   - Are enough resources being allocated to the tactical programs?
   - Are the commercial teams organised, and focussed to best deliver the tactics?

If you can answer this list of questions honestly, you will have isolated the problem in almost every case. If the plan is sound, unless there has been a seismic shift in the environment, then some factor involved in execution will need to be addressed. Make sure that people on the ground know what their part in the plan is. Even better, tie it to their compensation package if you really want to set their pulses racing.

5     Be clear about what you will, and will not do

Many new strategies mean significant changes for the organisation. Senior teams often underestimate how much resource will be required  to get the change to stick in the long term. Be unwaveringly clear about what the changes mean for the direction of the organisation. Understand that many people will take some time to come to understand that you are serious about the change and that you will outlive their resistance to it. Even if you are clear there will be some momentum behind the old approach, so err on the side of repetition.

Be clear with everybody what you intend do in the future and also what you will stop doing. New projects are regularly under-resourced because people will continue with former projects unless they are explicitly stopped from doing so. Be clear on this point or you will lack resources.

Being too prescriptive about an emergent process like crafting a strategy is always dangerous. However, if you follow the spirit of the points above you will be able to migrate your organisation from one which knows the 'what to do' of marketing strategy to one which also understands the 'how to do'.