Here we are in the heat of the planning season. We thought this would be the perfect time to share our list of top mistakes made in marketing planning. In dealing with marketing leaders every day, we see the same mistakes across many organizations, and we’d be delighted to help you steer clear of them.
Mistakes made most often in marketing planning:
1. Perfunctory Situation Assessment. Most marketers do an inadequate assessment of the current market situation, the performance of previous year’s programs, and the developments within their organization to identify the most salient issues/opportunities. This leads to a phenomenon we call SALY (Same As Last Year) with the end-result of always “fighting last year’s battle today.”
2. Unclear Priorities. When everything is critical, annual marketing plans are a widespread and non-hierarchical collection of tactics. Without a crisp articulation of three to five key initiatives with a clear prioritization, marketers have no mechanism to maintain order or rationality as things inevitably change throughout the year.
3. Too Busy with Day-to-Day Operations. Everyone is busy delivering against their objectives and planning is relegated to a secondary activity. When the team does get together, they don’t have time to develop a considered point-of-view on what needs to be done.
4. No Planning Template. Product groups, LOBs, consumer and commercial functions all use their own planning documents. This makes it impossible to integrate plans; compare and contrast strategies; or plan for activation.
5. Poor Integration of Strategies and Tactics. Marketing groups or functions are disconnected, leading to a dissipated market effect or an irrational customer experience.
6. Weak Assumptions. Too much effort is spent in just getting the plan built and not enough on the pivotal assumptions underpinning the plan. As a result, the plan becomes irrelevant when the assumptions change, but nobody knows.
7. One Time Use. Plans are arduously built and then relegated to sit on shelves. Without plan tracking and course-correction, the collective and substantial effort in annual planning is largely wasted.
8. Executives Don’t Know the Right Questions to Ask. Plans are typically reviewed in an interactive session. Executives need to critique the most important plans components, such as assumptions, assessments, priorities and contingencies—rather than focusing on budgets, tactics and strategies.
EMM Group has extensive experience helping companies overcome these obstacles. It’s not too late to build a great plan for 2014! If you need help, please don’t hesitate to contact us. As the proverb says, “he who fails to plan, plans to fail.”
