The P.L.A.I.N. Skills Needed To Be An Effective Strategic Marketing Planner

It’s plain and simple: To be an effective strategic marketing planner, one would need to cultivate this specific set of skills.

Marketing, in itself, is a skill or ability — specifically, “the ability to create and keep customers at a profit”, as the grandfather of modern marketing, Peter Drucker, once famously said.

And marketing ability is best improved by practice; mostly through applying concepts and strategies to products and services that can in turn develop important personal skills for the individual performing those tasks.

I’ve drawn up five P.L.A.I.N. skills desirable for mastering stages of a strategic marketing planning process, and achieving optimum market results:

1. Prioritising

The skill of prioritising is essential for any marketing planner, specifically during the business-customerising phase in the planning process.

Business-customerising is pretty much the back-cloth star of the entire marketing planning process, and therefore should be given an overarching priority. This was how John Egan, chief executive officer of Jaguar Cars from 1980 to 1990, managed to U-turn the slow, sloping car company back to its forward, pouncing glory. He prioritised Jaguar’s clienteles, taking the business from a sales and production-driven brand to one that is head-on customer-driven.

The ability to prioritise and target customer satisfaction is not only a big part of marketing function but it should also be adopted company-wide. The challenge is to influence and inspire employees to understand that all in all, they work for the benefit of the customers. That’s where the significance of customer-centric mission-setting comes into play. The mission statement allows for all, but especially employees, to see the company’s priorities.

The skill of prioritising also comes into play when choosing the right mission statements to set after a big brainstorming session. The ability to prioritise and focus on the quality few from the trivial many is what will further set an effective strategic marketing planner apart during this important mission-casting stage.

2. Learning

Once the tasks of giving precedence to a marketing-led company culture and choosing a customer-driven mission statement are done and dusted, a marketing planner moves on to the thorough analysis of a company’s competitive situation . Here, the planner’s learning skills are important. A huge chunk of marketing is research-based, be it internal, external or primary, which includes organising surveys and interviews. Being curious about the world and how markets work could drive marketers to exciting new places during this analysing phase.

The ability to ask good questions to get even better answers is where it’s at, especially when one is out in the field, conducting primary research, which costs money. There’s no time and it’s costly to ask irrelevant questions so to foster a knack at asking the right questions, a marketer’s love for learning, reading and staying up-to-date with business news and trends will prove necessary.

Constantly learning and understanding the various technical tools available for effective and efficient research is also crucial for every strategic marketing planner in this age of information overload. Learning how to use the latest data analytic software or technology can even help accelerate the understanding of big or small data collected about customers and competitors.

3. Assessing

The faster data is rudimentarily being understood, the faster marketers can proceed to the more exciting and adrenaline-pumping bit of marketing, which is the oh-so-sexy strategy formulation. While strategic-planning involves a lot of decision-making, where a strategic marketing planner must pick a course of action or customer segment to focus on in helping a company reach its goals without incessant doubts and overthought, it is equally, if not more important to first assess all of the information available in order to make that all-important judgement call.

The setting of marketing objectives also requires regular analysis and assessing of a company’s competitive situation. An excellent strategic marketing planner not only excels at coming up with an assessment of future opportunities but is equally able to weigh in the threats that others may dismiss or simply not notice.

Even when it comes time to outmanoeuvre the competition by changing the rules of the game, one must again always cognitively assess the whole situation and competitive landscape first. Marketing is an intellectual war that no one else has ever witnessed as “it can only be imagined in the mind,” according to Marketing Warfare author Al Ries. So, while it may be easy to make some intelligent assumptions when formulating a positioning strategy to win the war, it is better to assess and test everything possible, and assume close to nothing.

4. Innovation

Once the strategic war in one’s head is thought to have been won, the implementing phase can take place. For this, some innovative and critical thinking skills are required to fit a marketing mix into a company’s offer so that customers will perceive a competitive advantage is to be gained by purchasing those products or services in preference to those of competitors.

In the case of Jaguar cars, John Egan’s innovative thinking saw him breaking new grounds in the way the automobile company did things — not in the most spectacular or expensive way, but in the simplest, most pragmatic style. From the ingenuous implementation of doubling the number of quality inspectors on the production line and tying their pay packages to the average number of faults reported, thus ensuring quality immediately, to expanding the business to North America with a clear focus of selling to customers who value the European mark. These simple innovations in organising the marketing effort paid off for the brand up ‘till today.

5. Nitpicking

Still, after all that analysing, strategising and implementing, an effective strategic marketing planner must continue to nitpick. And while nitpicking isn’t exactly positive-sounding, many renowned leaders have been put on a pedestal for their nitpicking skills. Steve Jobs being one of them. The expert nitpicker was notorious for making early employees of Apple go back to the drawing board, days or even hours before a product is supposed to be launched. The result? Some extremely superb, user-intuitive products to ever hit the market.

Plus, the market is constantly changing so there’s no reason not to nitpick it. Though, it is important to note that nitpicking should only be used to prepare for the worst in a market, and not on what a certain staff member did or said. Ultimately, there is no “perfect” marketing strategic plan but if the goal is to preserve effectiveness and efficiency of the plan over time, occasionally taking it apart to put in back again, with improved screws and bolts, may just make it close to seamless.