Clear, aligned, succinct – not the words typically associated with marketing plans.  In fact, 57% of MLC members think strategic planning is the marketing activity with the greatest chance for improvement.

Marketing plans are often 20 to 100 page documents that cover every team’s goals and strategies, from the promotions team to the social media team.   Though comprehensive, these longwinded plans are too confusing to help individuals understand how their goals align with those of the broader organization.  Without alignment, marketers cannot create results, even when all the right elements are in place.

To tackle this problem, Marketing at MasterCard ruthlessly streamlined its annual marketing plan to one single page – the “Plan on a Page.”  MLC members, see an example of a completed Plan on a Page here or download this customizable marketing plan template.

Keep it sweet and simple.

We took a look at how MasterCard built their “Plan on a Page.”  A sampling of the Plan’s key traits:

Simplicity –the single-page rule limits the plan to the few goals that matter most.

Clarity – the plan links day-to-day tactics to high-level strategies (to help marketers understand how to achieve strategic goals).

Measurability – each goal, strategy, and tactic is tied to a clear measure of success.

The “Plan on a Page” not only saves planning time but also improves cross-functional understanding and alignment around strategic goals.  It also lends legitimacy and discipline to the marketing division, which is great because 73% of CEOs say marketers lack credibility!

All of that makes this simple marketing plan pretty sweet.

MLC members, read more about how a “Plan on a Page” can help marketing deliver greater bottom-line value.

Remember “The Sims”? My personal favorite game in college, it asks players to control a virtual human being. These “Sims”, as they’re called, are plopped into a virtual neighborhood with certain rules (such as gravity, aging, and an economy) and are left to their own devices to interact with the objects in their world and one another. The result is a functioning model of a human suburban neighborhood – one that undersimplifies things a bit, but is recognizably human. But what if marketers had a version of the Sims especially for them – one where they could put a marketing message into the environment, and watch how the “Sims” interacted with it?

One of the coolest parts of this year’s research into consumer process was getting to speak with a number of vendors and companies that do just that, using a process called agent-based modeling. Agent-based models are mathematically-created worlds populated by mathematically-created people, who are then exposed to a certain stimulus. In marketing, that stimulus is usually a message or marcom effort; other disciplines use diseases or changes in the economy.

The end result is a plausible estimate of the effects of a marketing campaign on a customer base – something that can be used to test proposed marketing plans to see which delivers the highest returns. For B2Cs, the “agents” can be consumers, for B2Bs, agent-based models can estimate the effect of marketing campaigns on corporate buying centers and within broad discipline areas.

MLC members, to learn how agent-based modeling works in marketing planning, please visit the members-only insight page we’ve put together on the subject, and register for our September 15 webinar, featuring MLC researchers and ThinkVine, a vendor in the modeling space.

As a blogger, former PR professional and (college) journalist, I spend a fair amount of time following arguments over the future of journalism, and, more broadly, of “professional content”. With the internet opening the floodgates of competition, how can competent journalism survive? If an amateur blogger is willing to do your job for free, who’s to stop them? Who’s going to cover boring (but important) subjects like city council meetings? Who’s going to keep people honest with long-form investigative journalism?

All decent questions, and ones we don’t have answers to yet. But lost in the endless back and forth debate over the topic is the evidence that a few web media outlets have figured out pieces of this puzzle, and some are even profiting.

This is a little off MLC’s beaten path, but with more and more media consumption moving to the web, marketers have as much skin in this debate as anyone else. So here are five web properties that are thriving in today’s media environment, and delivering some value to marketers, as well: Read More »

“The single biggest reason companies fail is that they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.”

–Gary Hamel, Author and Professor, London Business School

Professor Hamel puts his finger on one of the most important undercurrents facing marketing leaders in large enterprises today.  As products, channels, and geographic markets proliferate, marketers will overweight to the familiar (that which “is” today), and fail to account for the size of future opportunity (that which “might be”).  Why?

They certainly won’t do so intentionally.  Rather, the sheer complexity of resource allocation decisions across geographies, products and channels will lead many marketers to settle for incremental changes to last year’s budget allocation.  In the face of overwhelming complexity, this will feel like the safe, smart choice. Read More »

When we talk with heads of marketing about what “good” information flow between sales and marketing looks like, you can imagine the usual suspects that pop up: marketing updates provided to the sales team, sales providing feedback on messaging that’s resonating (or not resonating), and some type of ongoing win-loss analysis.

One conversation that stood out for us, though, was a conversation we had with the marcomm team at TELUS last year (TELUS is one of Canada’s top telecom service providers).  We were discussing their “Who Knew” marketing communications campaign (a submission from last year’s B2B MarComm Campaign Awards), which was an initiative that targeted influencers and decision-makers at medium and large businesses in Ontario. Read More »

With the Super Bowl not too far in the rear-view mirror, and basketball’s March Madness in full swing, B2C marketers break out the checkbook for new TV campaigns integrated with broader marketing communications efforts. We’ve seen everything from babies talking stock options to houses made from beer cans. But the overarching question remains: do the campaigns work?

The Council’s work on marketing communications has always stressed the primacy of client-side creative brief writing. Many heads of advertising will tell us they can ascertain the relative success of a campaign in advance simply by reading the creative brief sent to the agency. Our research shows that the best briefs contain three can’t-miss elements: Read More »

Einstein proffered that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the very definition of insanity.

Then I must ask the rhetorical question: how close do marketers come to that definition when it comes to marketing planning? The search term ‘marketing planning’ has appeared in the top five search terms on the MLC website for 24 months running. Our annual executive survey has reported ‘planning’ as a top-five area of improvement nearly every year since the poll’s inception.

Sincerely now, what do marketers keep doing year after year that keeps yielding the same underwhelming results?

Read More »

My New York Giants didn’t play this weekend – that’s one way to end a losing streak. I hadn’t enjoyed four consecutive losing Sundays of gesticulating wildly at my TV to no avail. But Fox, CBS, NBC, or ESPN didn’t quite care – I was watching.

As were about 17.2 million others any given Sunday, helping the NFL to their highest TV ratings in 20 years, a 15% uptick over last season. That’s an increase far beyond the 2% decline in stadium ticket sales, so much so that NFL national sponsorships are up. The pattern extends to baseball as well – World Series TV ratings were up 42% in 2009, which we can’t attribute solely to my Yankees’ return to dominance.

Clearly, we’re seeing not just changing consumer behaviors, but new, never-before-seen behaviors. A 15% viewership increase isn’t just former fans returning to TV. Our latest research on consumer behavior tells us that today’s winners are somehow helping consumers satisfy emerging desired outcomes – not the outcomes consumers say they want, but the latent (often emotional) ones that ethnographic research could uncover. Read More »

Last time, I wrote about how marketers should choose the right social experience—one that accentuates unique strengths—to put at the center of integrated communications.  We’re now at a spot where we can structure and assign roles to our other touchpoints so we can scale that social experience.

To get started, break touchpoints into two categories: secondary touchpoints (the outer circle in the graphic below) and supporting touchpoints (the middle circle):

Click Image to Enlarge | Secondary and supporting touchpoints establish a mental link and then drive the target audience to the social experience focal point.

1.  Secondary Touchpoints link the social experience to your brand for the target audience.  They’re often mass in nature—TV, out-of-home, print, and so on.  Best Buy’s TV ads showcasing Twelpforce are one example of such a secondary touchpoint.

2.   Supporting Touchpoints drive the target audience to the desired social experience.  Targeted banner ads, paid search, and direct marketing often do well here.  Best deployed, these touchpoints will:

• Engage a target audience at moments when they are susceptible to or desirous of the social experience
• Enable easy entry to the experience. Read More »

Last week, I wrote about marketers putting social experience at the center of their integrated communications.  I referred to Best Buy and Twelpforce.  Just this weekend, I caught a flurry of Honda TV spots promoting a particular Honda Facebook experience.

One of the open questions for marketers: How should one go about identifying the right social experience?

Answer: Identify an imprinting experience that best highlights your brand’s differentiating attributes or benefits. Read More »