I’ve just finished running another edition of my APG course on using marketing strategy to help solve client business problems. It’s always a hugely enjoyable course to teach and this year has been no exception. I get a particular buzz from seeing how those who are earlier in their careers than I am approach opportunities and challenges differently. This year’s cohort are more varied than ever, with a compelling mix of client, agency, commercial and not-for-profit planners and strategists. The standard of knowledge and enthusiasm they bring to the course is uniformly excellent.
One of the recurring themes I’ve heard from this year’s delegates, and those who went before them, is that they often feel pushed to get on with the task at hand before they are confident they are ready. In other words, help us get on and do loads of stuff, and the strategy will become clear as we go along. The ‘fail fast’ mantra of the digital age has a lot to answer for.
Coincidentally, I recently noticed a blog post that pointed out May 12 was the 92nd anniversary of the famous McElroy memo, the document often credited with being responsible for the birth of brand marketing. I suspect many of my course delegates would question what something older than their grandparents can teach them. I would suggest there is much to still be taken from it.
The essence of the McElroy memo was that effective brand managers first need to understand the problem they are dealing with and create a plan that addresses the ‘sore spot’, before only then creating a set of actions that puts it into practice. McElroy adds, for good measure, that brand managers should then look to measure the results so that they may optimise their plans in future. In other words, diagnose the issue and create a compelling strategy first, before implementing a set of tactics to enact it.
These principles, at least in the early stages of my career, seemed to be the received wisdom of how marketing works. It was accepted that equal amounts of effort should be spent on each of these three stages, albeit tactics always carried the highest bill once external costs were taken into account. Over time the swing towards starting tactics earlier in the process has gathered pace. I’d suggest that now, on average, tactics account for over 75% of marketing’s focus, with diagnosis and strategy little more than a side show. It’s all in the spirit of being nimble and agile. Tactification, if you like.
There’s a lot more to marketing than promotion, but let’s look at that for the moment because there’s great data from Binet and Field to rely on. The many conclusions from their analysis over the past ten years have been both common sense and revelatory. There is one I keep coming back to. When defining success as generating very large business effects, the success rate of campaigns that set out to help realise clearly defined business and commercial goals (ie campaigns that were based on a robust business strategy) was something like 50%. For campaigns based on intermediate objectives only, that success rate dropped to 11%. In other words, tactics based on marketing strategy were 4.5 more likely to generate results than those that weren’t.
You can always refine your plan as you go along, but putting tactics before strategy will always put cart before horse, with somewhat predictable results.