The contribution of marketing to strategy

Geoff Anderson here.

Welcome back! I will be joining you for 4 installments to discuss Strategic Planning, and the vital marketing role to be played in this activity. It would be helpful if you spend a few moments reviewing the case study I did earlier on segmentation. Case Study:How to Define a Market Segmentation Plan 

This past year, our company had a pretty significant change at the top, with a new CEO brought in to replace our old CEO who was retiring. With him, he brought some new processes, among them a rigidly structured approach to strategic planning. A side note here, our prior strategic planning was done by our GM’s (General Managers) and little input from the rest of the team. Some development tea leaves were read, some unbelievable market projections were pulled out of hats, often with no real foundation, and a plan was built, reviewed, approved, and put on the shelf, never to be seen again. (sound familiar? It is more common that you would think).

Our new process was a radical departure from this closed door approach, and a remarkably rewarding endeavor. I will describe the process in this post, and then share some experiences with the expanded role of marketing, and how the segmentation is tied to the whole process.

The new process was divided into three distinct phases. The first phase is to define the strategic question. Think of this as the anti-mission statement, it is the question that drives the answer that is ultimately the mission statement. This is a lot more difficult that it sounds. It is tempting to insert many platitudes, and vacuous statements (as often make it into mission statements). But in the end, what is really needed is a crisp, easy to comprehend question that really tells the world what you want to be when you grow up. Fortunately, the primary owner of this is our GM. Naturally, as the leader of marketing in our organization, I was consulted extensively, and had many ideas on how to focus it down.

The second phase is where Marketing reigns. Here is where you pull together a story that highlights why you think you can achieve the strategic question. If you have done your research, know your markets, and segments, and have confidence in your abilities as a marketer, you can do this. You should have the data. You know your markets. You know what it is that you have in your bag of tricks. And you can put together a cohesive story.

The third and final phase is to assemble 2-3 options for actions to execute. Naturally, your work done in phase 2 will support these actions.

And that is where I will leave you this week. Next week, we will expand the phase 2, and discuss how to leverage all that work you did to define and segment your markets. Until then, Happy Marketing!