Comments (1)

By Mitch Glasser, August 13, 2010 12:05 PM

In Part I, I put down some ideas about how to tell whether your marketing organization has a real strategy or just a collection of words labeled strategy.

Let’s go another step.  For the sake of argument, we will assume you have an honest to goodness marketing strategy (and it is the correct one for your company—no small assumption). Now here is a test to consider:

If an outside marketing consultant studied your organization, documenting all your plans, tactics and activities, what would he or she conclude is your marketing strategy?  Would it agree with what you’ve stated it to be?

It should, but more than likely it would not. In my experience there is a chronic lack of rigor applying a company’s marketing strategy to its tactical planning.  They are usually done by different groups and are seen as independent functions.  What results from this approach is that the tactical planning winds up creating the strategy, rather than the other way around.

You see, it is the sum of your tactics that defines the strategy under which you actually operate (regardless of what is stated in your PowerPoint slides).  The stated and actual strategies will be one and the same if your tactics were properly developed from your strategy.  If your tactics were developed independently—that is, without deliberate adherence to your stated strategy—they are bound to collectively point to a different strategy than the one intended.

It could be even worse.  If the consultant can’t recognize a consistent purpose and focus running through your plans, for all practical purposes you don’t have a strategy.  That is, you are not focused enough to accomplish anything in particular.

The upshot of either of these scenarios is that you won’t achieve the expected outcome from your marketing activities, and you’ll realize something needs to change.  It is both difficult and time consuming to uncover whether it’s your strategy or tactics leading you astray.

Even in the best if economic times it is no easy task to develop a true, effective marketing strategy.  In today’s environment, getting the strategy and tactics right the first time is imperative to survival and growth because there is little wiggle room for a ‘do-over’.

Think about allowing someone from outside your company to look at your tactical plans and see what they come up with as your ‘implied’ strategy.  Yes, it would be a gutsy thing to do because it might challenge some of your market assumptions.  But if problems do exist, how soon would you like to know about them?  Sooner, when you can actually do something about them, or when the market eventually tells you something is amiss?

Your marketing achievements could rest on your answer.

Comments (3)

By Mitch Glasser, August 9, 2010 7:15 AM

Marketing strategies are like budgets, every marketing group has one.  But is what’s claimed to be the marketing ‘strategy’ really a strategy?

A true marketing strategy describes the intended outcome of a marketing organization’s cumulative activities.  It describes what it’s trying to accomplish given its resources and the state of the market it tries to serve.  The strategy is fed by an understanding of company’s:

• Targeted customers
• Competitors
• Its own strengths, ‘unique-nesses’ and position in the market
• The business and economic environment in which it has to operate

It addresses the firm’s advantage in the market and often the position it is trying to achieve.  Importantly, a real strategy also limits what the company offers.  Does your marketing strategy read like this?

Once created, the most important purpose of a marketing strategy is to serve as a framework for aligning all the planned tactics and activities with the department’s intended accomplishments.

Operationally, the strategy is a key tool for tactical planning in that it is the filter through which all proposed marketing tactics must pass to be approved.  If the tactic supports the strategy, then it can move ahead (albeit possibly dropped for other reasons).  If it addresses customer targets, products, promotions, pricing, distribution, communication, etc. out of line with the strategy’s intent and direction, it is eliminated.  Not using the strategy in this way effectively means you have no strategy.

What does a strategy NOT do?

A strategy does not state or imply what will be done—specific activities, operational plans, etc.  These are all part of tactics, and are determined based upon what is needed to realize the strategy—those activities which will move you from where you are to where the strategy says you desire to be.  They are the execution tools for implementing the strategy, and not part of the strategy itself.

More often than not, what’s purported to be a marketing strategy is merely a set of tactics assembled in strategic-sounding phrases.  The lack of a marketing strategy, a real, well developed (and utilized) marketing strategy underlies much of the ineffectiveness of today’s marketing activities.  Why?  Because without the focus brought by a real strategy, all planning and execution activities will not be pulling in the same direction.  There will be no synergy across tactics that enables them to build on each other.

If your marketing strategy contains the tactical ‘whats’ of your activities and not the higher level market issues mentioned above, you don’t really have a strategy.

You have a problem.