What’s a “Marketing Plan”?
And what is it good for?
Last week, as part of a curriculum review inside my department, I decided to ask Twitter what it thought of marketing plans. Should I be teaching this concept?
35K views and 3K engagements later (link here: https://twitter.com/bruceclarkprof/status/1230328553981595649?s=20), I want to try to summarize some of what I learned and some of my own thinking here. I also ran a private group conversation on LinkedIN with former students of mine to talk about whether and how they use plans. I’ll call out a few people by their Twitter handles as I go along here, which does not mean they endorse my views in any way.
Why Plan at All?
Let’s start with the purpose of any kind of planning. As many participants observed, the main point of a plan is to try to figure out how to get from some current state to a desired state. In the figure above, we have a current state (the situation) and the desired state (the aspiration). A plan should give a sense of how to connect these two things.
This is not a new idea, but one worth reminding ourselves of. Short of money laundering, our goal in our workplace should be to try to improve on our current situation. Here is a slightly expanded version of the basic concept from Stephen King of J.W. Thompson from the 1970s (tks to @Denhoff_).
(Note a full pdf of the presentation from which this comes is also available at this link: well worth your time)
More broadly, preparing a plan should help ensure three things: (1) Thinking, (2) Direction, and (3) Alignment.
Ensure Thinking
In a world that seems to be dominated by short-termism and incessant communications, formulating a plan requires that someone stop and think. Whatever plan you have should help you acquire and organize information to think in a meaningful way. Outlines, frameworks, and checklists can all help ensure that you have covered the important questions.
Several respondents suggested that diagnosis of key issues is one of the most useful outputs of a plan (@simcevoy, @justonlyjohn). What’s going on? What’s the problem (or opportunity) here? In the same vein, other respondents argued the thinking was at some level more important than the plan. One quoted Dwight Eisenhower’s admonition that “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable” (@andyhoopermkt). Or as @bernardjansen put it, “Planning is critical. Any plan — even a shit plan. Just plan! The mere exercise is valuable.”
Ensure a Direction
Given we have some diagnosis, a plan should help us figure out how to close the gap between where we are and where we want to be. In fact, plans can reveal new or unarticulated goals for an organization. In whatever form, a plan should indicate a direction of travel for the organization. (“We’re going to go north.”)
Ensure Alignment
For us to “go north,” we are going to have to align the efforts of multiple actors. We will need to acquire and deploy resources, both financial and non-financial. A good plan motivates alignment around the common direction.
Some of this alignment may need to occur outside the organization. We rarely go to market alone, and marketing plans can help our partners understand how we need to work together to be successful in a marketplace. One former student of mine told me they shared their marketing plans with both suppliers and distributors to help everyone work together on delivering value to customers.
Is This the Marketing Plan?
To provoke conversation, this is the plan outline that I posted. It’s a very lightly edited version of the marketing plan outline given in a popular undergraduate marketing textbook (that shall remain nameless).
I could have used other books, but the basic principles are not very different. There’s some kind of situation analysis, some kind of marketing strategy to meet objectives, some kind of tactical initiatives to execute the strategy, and some sense of financial implications and controls to ensure execution unfolds as it should.
Response to this outline was generally (though not uniformly) positive. For example:
· Your outline plan has more strategy than many marketers ever experience. Critical for future executives to learn the difference between marketing strategy and marketing tactics. So much pressure to learn the tools masks the need for critical thinking and strategic analysis. @pworthington
· Not only should this be taught, it should be handed out to all marketers, right now, and they should ask themselves if they have the answers for these things. @POSMarketer
· I definitely think they should still be taught this, as the fundamentals of marketing and marketing planning haven’t changed and actually there are a lot of ‘marketers’ in this world who don’t know how to do this. @KatieColbourne
Dig into the thread, however, and there are a lot of “yes, buts” and a few flat out “no’s.” I’ll summarize the objections and concerns in three (interrelated) areas:
1. Can we make it more modern?
2. Can we make it more actionable?
3. Can we make it more dynamic?
Can We Make it More Modern?
We need to Analyze, Strategize, and Plan. Many respondents expressed concern that while as a whole the material in the textbook outline needed to be covered, the actual content and terminology was in serious need of updating. In fact, one of the reasons I started the thread was that I hear a lot more about business models, venture plans, and go-to-market plans than I do about “marketing plans.” While @everardhunder argues these are all basically “rebadged” marketing plans, there’s a possibility the marketing plan itself needs rebadging.
· Anything that has SWOT written in it feels outdated. @TadasLDN
· This is the main and minimum basic headlines but I think new generations need to learn or create subtitles with today’s facts and needs. @SevgiA2013
· The strategy is always the same, it’s the planning, deployment, and channel distribution that perhaps need an update. New tech. New consumer behaviors. Requires new methods. @naynerz
I could (and may) write a whole article about the heat SWOT generated across the thread, but the more general concern is that even if the principles are timeless, this outline sounds so 20th century, making it a tough sell internally.
In my dark ages MBA, marketing was summed up as “3C’s, 4P’s”, as in Company, Customer, Competitors, and Product, Price, Promotion, Place. A recent Harvard Business School note on marketing situation analysis (2010) has us up to 5C’s (add context and collaborators) and respondents online suggested we are up to 7 or 8P’s (god only knows). I’m not sure this is an improvement.
Respondents noted a number of more modern frameworks that could be used to conduct marketing planning. I’ll highlight two in particular:
Business Model Canvas
The Business Model Canvas was recommended by multiple respondents. Here’s what it looks like:
I’d probably describe this more as strategic planning, especially for newer ventures, but it clearly has many marketing elements and has the virtue of thinking about how to build a business serving customers more generally. Here’s the Wikipedia version (from which this image was taken): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Model_Canvas
SOSTAC
Multiple respondents also suggested PR Smith’s SOSTAC(TM) model, as in Situation, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action and Control. It is often presented as a cycle as follows:
This comes much closer to the logic of the textbook marketing plan without burdening the plan with legacy terminology — though you could certainly still fit a SWOT under Situation. Here’s the official SOSTAC website, which also includes links to books and training courses: https://prsmith.org/SOSTAC/
A number of other alternative frameworks are nicely summarized here: https://smallbusiness.chron.com/alternatives-swot-analysis-64967.html
I’ve come to the view that the term “marketing plan” itself is part of the problem. It implies this is a plan for the marketing department. @MarketingNickE observed that marketing plans can be self-siloing if they appear to be divorced from the rest of the organization.
Rather than “Marketing Plan,” I think we’d be better served by calling it the “Customer Plan.” The organization as a whole needs to serve customers in a way that provides value to the customer and the organization. Some of that happens inside the marketing department, some of it happens outside the marketing department.
Can We Make It More Actionable?
Too many marketing plans are seen as having too little impact on the organization. Three things can help here.
Tie to Corporate Strategy and Concerns
This seems brain-dead obvious — what’s the alternative, ignoring or contradicting what senior management wants? — but several respondents commented that poor fit between marketing plans and the company is a big problem.
· It’s stone dead unless integrated into the business strategy and the investor case. @MarketingNickE
· Need to begin w broad corporate strategy. How does the biz make $? W/o that, plan=useless @mdbergman36
To be fair, this is sometimes corporate’s fault: not everyone understands what corporate’s strategy is, if they have one at all. Assuming the strategy is known, well, you shouldn’t be proposing something wildly off. A more subtle point is to try to look at the language of the corporate strategy. Can you position your initiative as fitting that language? This is part of the internal marketing of any plan.
Practically speaking, as @mdbergman36 observes, growth is often the generic objective for marketing plans. If you’re really not sure how to proceed, how does the plan help the company as a whole grow?
More broadly, inadequate attention to or, ahem, understanding of financials can be a big drawback relative to the rest of the organization. Allowing that revenue growth is often a goal, taking a swing at the profit impact of the plan can be very helpful in convincing senior management that you are on the team.
Finally, have a thought for other parts of the organization. The best marketing plans are cross-functional. A good marketing plan should indicate what is needed from other parts of the organization and what the consequences of the plan might be for other parts of the organization. You may need to engage outside actors as well, e.g., agencies, distributors, etc.
What You Show Is Not What You Did
A complaint I heard in some corners of the thread is that marketing plans go unread, forgotten, or both. Sometimes this is a bug — it’s either a genuinely bad plan or the whole thing was a meaningless tick-the-box exercise in service of some bureaucratic mandate.
But for successful plan users, this was a feature.
Across a variety of industries, people talked about how the plan spawned useful short follow-on documents. There was no expectation that you would go back and read the plan, but every expectation that you would read the follow-ons.
One way this translated out was into activity documents. @EllieKey indicated plans at her organization were translated into tactical activity spreadsheets for day to day activity planning and quarterly review.
A second useful document was the plan summary as applied to a particular business unit. A former student of mine now runs marketing for a multi-unit business. Each unit gets a short document summarizing target customer, positioning, basic value delivery approaches, and a few “big picture” goals. This is enough to keep units headed in the right direction between more detailed periodic reviews. @simcevoy proposed a similar idea in the Twitter discussion in suggesting the most useful plan is a “rough outline” of direction to which managers can easily refer.
Another former student works in a multinational that rolls up marketing plans to HQ through one-page OGSM documents (Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Measures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGSM). All the analysis shown in the generic textbook outline gets done, but it all gets summarized in the OGSM doc.
A B2B CMO reports using one- to two-page templates covering Priorities, Outcomes (relative to those priorities), Activities, and Timing to prompt discussions internally across functions and stakeholders to build alignment, momentum and buy-in.
Several respondents suggested visualizing the strategy in something beyond words is helpful. @colinlewis was kind enough to share a simple generic marketing strategy diagram in this regard:
In all these cases, they have the plan. They just don’t show the plan. Essentially the plan is distributed into components (different parts of analysis, strategy, action plans) and at any given time we only worry about some of the components. A metaphor I might use here is a satellite launch. You need the booster rocket to get the satellite into orbit. But once it’s in orbit, you worry about the satellite, not the boosters. It’s fine if no one ever reads the full plan again.
Plan for After the Plan
Especially in the classic big corporate planning process that can take weeks or months, there’s a big push to get the plan done. And then we can all go back to doing our jobs. If there’s no plan for what is going to happen after the planning process is over, you’re not likely to get much from your marketing plan. Here are three good questions to ask:
Who is going to own this thing? In many cases that is line management, but ownership of the plan should be clear. Who will bleed and die to see this thing through?
How is this plan going to be reviewed? A plan without review is pretty much guaranteed to be pushed aside in favor of things that are. There may be a formal planning unit involved, or a more informal steering committee. If nothing else consider how plan review will relate to the budgeting process in your organization. (One of my former students works in an organization where this happens in lockstep: marketing plans and budgets are due at the same time.)
What’s the action plan? “Action Plans” is a common headline in marketing plans, but too often they are an imperfectly organized list of tasks and deadlines. Try what I call “poor man’s project management”: AARTM, or Actions, Actors, Resources, Timelines, Metrics.
· Actions — what tasks need to get done?
· Actors — who is going to complete these tasks?
· Resources — what resources do they need to be successful?
· Timelines — when do the tasks need to be completed? In what order?
· Metrics — how will we know the tasks have been completed? Have been successful?
I like a simple grid for this with the actions in the columns and the other four items in the rows. Fill in the blanks. This in itself may make a nice follow-on document to a plan. I’ll argue the most important line in the grid is Actors: as with plan ownership, unless someone is accountable for a task, it’s unlikely to get done.
Can We Make it More Dynamic?
The third concern in the Twitter discussion was that the world is changing too quickly for planning.
These days speed is essential so no one has time to write and no one has time to read. @mediamulle
This was the most interesting part of the thread for me, as solutions were quite diverse in terms of the amount of structure imposed.
Loose Principles
The least structured path is what I’ll call “tight analysis, loose principles.” (tks @simcevoy) You go forward with a loose set of guidelines, and then test and learn how well those guidelines are working out. Intensive measurement helps course correct as the market changes, but there’s no expectation of a detailed or even strongly directional plan over time. The plan will change when it needs to be changed.
Contingency Planning
A second approach is to prepare for specific changes. @mdbergman36 advocated for explicit contingency planning around key uncertainties and risks. Scenario planning may be helpful in this regard. If a contingency occurs, you change, if not, you don’t.
Planned Change
A final path is to schedule frequent updates. A former student of mine is a VP for a CPG firm where they run a rolling three-year plan that is updated every quarter.
Dynamics is the area where specific industry and market factors loom largest. Some that are likely to matter include:
New vs. existing product. For new products, planned change may be hard to execute. You don’t necessarily know the frequency or magnitude of changes that will occur in the market. You’re more likely to have to be on the loose principles end of the spectrum, perhaps with a handful of likely contingencies. For existing products, you can have a lot more structure because you understand how change in the product-market works and what contingencies are likely to matter. Mature products in particular may benefit from the planned change model.
Long- vs. short-cycle businesses. It’s hard to test and learn if an offer requires significant time and investment to be introduced and nurtured. If you have to spend years developing a drug, you’re not going to test and learn. Similarly, if customers buy or contract over long periods, you’re not going to have enough observations for test and learn. On the other hand, if products are easy to modify and markets change quickly, loose principles are more feasible. I once consulted with an internet software company whose internal mantra was “tomorrow is another rev,” as in “revision.” Just keep putting stuff out the door following loose principles and see how it does.
Large vs. small businesses. Large businesses may need more structured plans to ensure alignment and acquire and deploy resources. It’s easy to operate on loose principles when you have 20 people in one office. It’s a lot harder when you have 20,000 people in 100 offices.
So What’s in the Plan?
In the end, people would like a single outline or checklist. None will be perfect. Which are at least pretty good? (Or at least not shit?) Allowing we may not show all our work, what do we need to think about?
At a broad level, I think the SOSTAC approach is fine. If you can have intelligent thoughts under each of these six areas along with some sense of how the areas interrelate, you are probably in the top half of the class!
Similarly, if you like the old school Situation Analysis, Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning, Marketing Mix approach, god bless. These frameworks help you gather and organize information, and even if you don’t show someone a SWOT or 4Ps, they can help you ensure thinking, direction, and alignment.
If you’d like a somewhat different organization and language, here’s an alternative I’ve used:
1. Analysis
1.1. Context. These are the macro-environmental factors that characterize the market conditions in which your firm and industry operate. What is going on in the wide world beyond your industry? I like a straight PESTEL analysis here: Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal. There are many resources for this kind of analysis online. Here’s a Wikipedia discussion of the framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEST_analysis
1.2. Category. Your company or business unit typically operates in a category characterized by a set of competitors, and a set of collaborators (e.g., distributors, suppliers, complementary providers) who bring a particular set of solutions to market. What is going on in this category? I’m not a big fan of Porter’s Five Forces analysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysis) — too static — but if you like that framework, it fits here.
1.3. Customer. What’s the state of your current customer base? Who might represent attractive new customers?
1.4. Company. How is your organization performing within its category and context? What are its resources and capabilities? What are its larger strategic concerns?
2. Direction
2.1. Diagnosis. Given the analysis, what really needs to be addressed here? A number of respondents talked about the importance of this step, and I like to break it out because it otherwise can be too easy to head straight to the first solution that comes to mind.
Generically, look for two things that often suggest key issues.
Change. Change can represent threats or opportunities for different firms. Thinking about how each of the four analysis areas are changing can identify key areas for action.
Gaps. To the extent the four analysis areas are disconnected from one another, this suggests gaps that may need to be closed. If your company is disconnected from customers, that’s pretty obviously a problem, but other gaps can be interesting as well. What if your whole category is out of step? If your category is tainted (e.g., airlines in the age of climate change), how does your company break free of this? On the other hand, sometimes a company out of step with the category can be the problem. If it’s important for a company to be seen as a legitimate member of an industry (e.g. an accredited hospital), closing company-category gaps may be necessary.
2.2. Aspiration. A brief general statement of how the issue should be resolved and a specific statement of what success would look like. “Launch a new offering in the Asia-Pacific market, with a goal of one million units sold by the end of year 2.” There’s no problem with being a bit vague with the direction, but how would I know this worked two years from now?
3. Plan
Marketing creates, communicates, and delivers value to a customer. The plan should specify each of these areas.
3.1. The Offer. What’s the combination of benefits and price (the value proposition) that we want to have in the marketplace? What problem does this solve for a customer? Why would they buy this offering rather than a different one? This combines the typical Product and Price P’s (and as one respondent observed, gets us away from calling everything a Product). Branding issues may be relevant here, and in general competitive advantage should be addressed. This section should also highlight revenue streams and unit economics.
3.2. Communication. How are we going to communicate with customers? What messages do we want to convey how?
3.3. Delivery. Operations, Distribution, and Support. What has to happen to put value in the hands of the customer? This would have been the old “Place” P, but I like highlighting operations and support as well. Someone has to produce the offering, and in many cases post-sale support is a forgotten child.
3.4. Action Plan. AARTM as suggested previously. Under metrics, specify both short- and long-term. Long-term should reflect the aspiration. Short-term should be intermediate indicators that we are headed in the right direction. Reach or distribution penetration within a certain time period would be an example of this. It’s going to be awfully hard to sell something if we have not reached enough people or are not in enough shops.
3.5. Financials. Plans should make an effort at both a budget and an income statement for a relevant period of time. Senior management will reasonably want to know how much you are going to spend, what you plan to spend it on, and what kind of return may be expected. I will observe, ahem, that this was the least discussed aspect of marketing plans in the Twitter thread. I think that is a mistake. (Thanks for chatting, @FinanceDirCFO.)
Especially in large organizations, plans are negotiated, particularly around budget. That’s OK. There’s no point in proposing something the organization is unwilling or unable to do. As noted earlier, a plan is a communication device as much as anything, and shopping around a good draft plan may help you internally market your ideas.
Thanks
Over about 72 hours I’d say I interacted with well over a hundred people who were generous with their time and thoughts. An incomplete scrape of the Twitter feed was close to 10,000 words. Thank you to the long list of people I am not going to try to list here; I’ll try to reach out to many of you with this document. I hope all of you have taken something from this that improves your thinking and planning. You have definitely helped me in what I need to talk about with my students. Keep in touch. . .
Bruce Clark is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University (https://damore-mckim.northeastern.edu/). He researches, writes, speaks, and consults on managerial decision-making, especially regarding marketing and branding strategy, customer insight, and how managers learn about their markets. He may be found on Twitter @bruceclarkprof and on LinkedIN at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruceclarkprof/
