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.

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.

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:

1) TBD

In development for nearly a year, TBD is probably the most anticipated local news website – well, ever. Focusing on Washington, DC and its suburbs, TBD has an extremely lean editorial staff – according to some sources, a fifth of the size of the Washington Post’s local news bureau – but still delivers in-depth coverage of local issues by aggregating their “Community Network” – a collection of neighborhood and niche blogs. For instance, an item on DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood might be supplemented (or taken entirely) from a blogger focused on the neighborhood.

TBD also has been active in the mobile app space, creating applications for DC weather, local news, and a special application designed for the much-maligned Metro system.

2) Gawker Media

Gawker Media is the case study in emphasis on pageviews and visits above all else – but it works! The Gawker Media network comprises eight sites (with beats in parentheses):  Gizmodo (gadgets), Gawker (gossip), Lifehacker (productivity), Kotaku (video games), Deadspin (sports), Jezebel (feminist-oriented news and commentary), io9 (science fiction),  and Jalopnik (cars).

According to a recent New Yorker profile of the network’s creator, Nick Denton, these eight sites generate an astounding 450 million pageviews a month. The way they do it sometimes bends journalistic ethics – for instance, Gizmodo paid for an unauthorized prototype of the iPhone 4, months before it was released – but they get results, and eyeballs.

In a plus for marketers, Gawker Media has struck some unique sponsorship deals with advertisers, including sponsored posts and site wraps (Casio and Intel have been recent buyers).

3) TechCrunch

TechCrunch is the granddaddy of Silicon Valley blogs, and its creator, Mike Arrington, is known as having one of the most fearsome Rolodexes in the business. And that level of connection pays off – TechCrunch is usually among the first to break news of an impending M&A, VC deal, or IPO, as well as being one of the central clearinghouses for professional gossip in the tech space.

And in that space, where having information is at a premium and having it first can be worth serious cash, TechCrunch has proven quite a valuable piece of online real estate. It was recently purchased by AOL for a sum between $30 and $40 million.

4) SB Nation

SB Nation is like crack for the obsessive sports fan: with 285 (!) blogs focused on every major American professional team, most big-name college athletic programs, and a fair number of niche sports (figure skating, mixed martial arts, and Canadian junior hockey), there’s not much sports news that doesn’t get reported on by the network.

Similar to TBD, SB Nation relies on dedicated fan bloggers to provide much of its coverage, but they’ve also recently launched local verticals in over 30 American cities, which aggregate the blogs focused on the teams in the region, as well as host additional content from paid staffers.

SB Nation has posted astounding growth numbers – in 2009, revenues increased fourfold, and as of August, the family of sites registered 8 million visitors and 40 million page views each month. And with only 31 full-time staff, they may have struck upon a formula for sustainability in web media.

5) ScienceBlogs

A bit more niche than the other networks, but ScienceBlogs has quickly become the home of  many of the web’s most prominent science writers – over 80, in fact, on topics ranging from astronomy to medicine to zoology. ScienceBlogs has also launched a site called Research Blogging, which aggregates posts on peer-reviewed research from experts – an innovation that keeps readers from wondering whether bloggers have any expertise in their subjects.

The material here is dense, and big, Gawker-like numbers are harder to come by, but ScienceBlogs gets around 2.4m unique visitors a month, and it’s still growing.

One cautionary note for marketers, though – bloggers in the network successfully held a “strike” at the prospect of a Pepsi-sponsored and written blog this summer. Display ads have been accepted by the community, but sponsored content – not so much.

MLC members, for more information on advertising in the blogosphere, please visit our research brief on the topic.

“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.

But this backward-looking approach to resource allocation will be ever more dangerous as consumption shifts massively to new geographic markets and channels across the coming five years.  Marketers will underweight opportunities that don’t fit neatly into their familiar worldview.  They will arrive late to seize the larger opportunities of what “might be”.  And so marketing leaders ought to be thinking hard—right now—about how to simplify the complexity that would otherwise lead them to the familiar and the safe.

To that end we at the Council will be on the lookout for the handful of marketers that are making strides in this area.  The first we’ve spotted is MTV Networks (hereafter referred to as MTVN).  MTVN has put in place a system for allocating MarComm resources that tames marketing complexity, enabling it to allocate resources on a forward-looking basis.  MTVN’s system does four things very well:

1)  Delivers data-driven insight—MTVN’s system is grounded on cycles of in-market media experiments, which enables rapid learning and validation (or invalidation) of key assumptions.

2)  Simplifies—MTVN’s system uses technology to simplify the resource decision experience for marketers, hiding complexity that clouds decisions, while highlighting the critical factors that illuminate the optimal courses of action based on future value.

3)  Serves as lingua franca—MTVN’s approach puts common language to implicit criteria that everyone from market research to finance were infusing into decisions, often unwittingly.  Establishing a common tongue enables stakeholders to engage in resource allocation discussions with healthy tension, not unhealthy friction.

4)  Integrates decisions “vertically” – MTVN’s system ties decisions together from the higher-level portfolio allocation decisions (“Of all our programs/products, what should we market?”) to the lower level questions of optimizing the mix on individual campaigns (“How should we market it?”)

MTVN is finding that its system boosts the productivity of its media budget by 15-25%. Moreover, in the words of MTVN’s Todd Cunningham, SVP of Strategic Insights and Research:

“We’re finding that [this approach] forms a system for how to think about marketing spend—its creating a kind of collaborative intelligence around planning that we didn’t really have before.”

MLC Members, please take a first look at the case study.  More importantly, join us for a webinar on September 29^th, where we’ll walk through MTVN’s resource allocation system in greater detail.  Todd Cunningham from MTVN will join us, as well as Rex Briggs, proprietor of Marketing Evolution, which supported MTVN in building the system.

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.

Following best practice, TELUS mapped their marcomm touchpoints to the target’s “typical day.”  Touchpoints included elevator wraps in prospects’ buildings, billboards in very specific locations in Toronto’s business district and key travel locations (e.g., Toronto Island Airports) and SMS messages to reach customers on the commute.

However, where TELUS really stood out here was HOW they identified the best touchpoints for their mix.  TELUS capitalized on the knowledge of their local sales-forces, who were able to point out the specific elevator shafts in the specific buildings where an ad would have the greatest potential to be seen by a set of prospects or customers in the target market.  So what is great here is how efficient the media spend was as a result of being able to capitalize on internal intelligence.

As a bonus, by taking this approach when selecting their mix, TELUS ensured that the campaign was fully integrated with one of its other key communication channels – namely the sales force – who capitalized on the campaign extensively as they felt both enfranchised and knowledgeable about the communications effort.

Do you have your own example of B2B MarComm success from the past year and a half?  Submit your entry into our 2010 B2B MarComm Campaign Awards by June 30^th, and receive an extra ticket to our October Summit in Las Vegas.

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:

1. A precise target audience beyond demographics, including behavior and psychographic traits

2. A core insight that synthesizes the motivations behind consumer behavior (or non-behavior, as the case may be)

3. A single communications task that will move the audience from their current attitude/behavior to the desired attitude/behavior.

Knowing these, it’s difficult not to look at odd-ball television ads and reverse engineer them back to the brief that started it all, wondering if the ad’s ’success’ will merely win it a Cleo or truly accomplish the communications task. Given the marketing and advertising know-how of this blog’s readers, I’d like to start a series designed to get your take on exactly these types of ads, using the key elements of a creative brief as grading criteria. The first ad that came to mind is Old Spice’s ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ video that debuted on YouTube in February, made it to television shortly thereafter, and now has nearly six million YouTube views.

The ad is deliberately provocative, and at times, utterly illogical. The actor is speaking directly to females in the commercial, yet the target audience – as stated publicly by Procter & Gamble over the past few years – is teenage males. This audience overlaps tremendously with Unilever’s hyper-sexualized Axe brand. Perhaps the distinction between the two is the addition of the female secondary audience and the impact of that audience on the teenage male purchaser.

So I ask of our readers: does the campaign work? What is the insight behind the campaign that makes it distinct from Axe? Does the associated campaign have a single communications task? Hone your responses by adding a comment above; I’ll add further MLC perspective as the comments expand.There’s no right answer, but this type of thinking can sharpen your saw for the creative briefs you write – ensuring that catchy campaigns also translate to business results.

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?

There are two near-constant mistakes that prevent most organizations from building successful marketing plans:

1. They replicate the previous year’s marketing plan, subtly tweaking resource allocation and marketing activities from the previous year, which was only slightly different from the year before that, and so forth.

2. Interim changes to plans are either made with little regard to the original strategy, or not made at all. In layman’s terms, some call this tactic the ‘stick-it-in-a-drawer’ method of planning.

Taken together, these mistakes yield plans that are unresponsive to changing market conditions, miss shifts in customer needs, and produce tactical plans reliant on ‘traditional’ media.  With continued uncertainty in today’s economy and social media shifting the communications landscape daily, an incremental, unadaptable marketing plan is the surest path to wasted effort and misguided strategy.

So rather than simply expecting different results, how can marketer do planning differently?  For starters, marketing plans must link to corporate strategy – it’s the only way to demonstrate the function’s contribution to the ultimate arbiter: shareholder value.  Marketers should implement metrics immediately after settling on strategy – not after selecting tactics. Cross-functional leaders don’t much care how many Facebook fans you have; they want to know whether your strategy worked … which most CFOs measure in dollars. The closer your metrics are to financial outcomes, the stronger the case for marketing investment becomes.

With linkage to corporate priorities, Marketing’s performance is inextricably linked to the performance of peer functions. Harness that cross-functional input during planning – solicit input from Sales (particularly B2B companies); understand how the R&D pipeline will impact future sales; make sure Market Research provides the best customer insight. Lastly, practice integrated marketing communications, with each medium and touchpoint serving a clear purpose toward the achievement of marketing objectives.

Implementing these principles will at least break the insanity habit, but by no means will they alone yield long-term success. There remains a need to build a repeatable process embedded in daily workflow, where the plan is a living document referenced throughout the year.

MLC Members, if you’re struggling with planning, we’d love to understand your specific challenges so we can build better resources to support you on this perennial pain point.  Please take this two-minute survey about the state of your organization’s marketing planning process or e-mail my colleague Abhaya Menon, and we’ll be sure to follow up!

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.

There are two bigger questions here, though. First, are our marketing communications teams equipped to fast-cycle changes to the touchpoint mix as quickly as consumer media consumption shifts? Second, can the NFL or MLB move these fans from a statistical, recessionary blip to long-term loyalty?

As my colleague Pat explored in a previous post, social media is upending our traditional touchpoint planning models. Rapid change to consumer behavior adds another monkey wrench to the tumult social media has created. With more control over media consumption than ever before, consumers’ behavioral shifts – like the mass movement to TV for the NFL – place an even heavier burden on marketers to move dollars quickly to maximize touchpoint value. Think about it – the millions now watching NFL for three hours on a Sunday afternoon are now not doing something else.

Marketers need to harness these consumer changes and make them permanent. The only way we’re going to do that is to establish higher-order, emotional connections with consumers, accelerating loyalty before the next wave of change hits. Because let’s be honest – another Giants loss or two, yard work might start to look attractive again.

MLC members, access our resources on building loyalty with your consumers by developing a shared value, the higher-order emotional connection shared by your brand and the consumer.

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.

Once you’ve assigned roles to touchpoints, you can choose the metrics best suited for those roles.  You’ll find that the focus of the metrics can be much more specific now, because each touchpoint has a specific role to play.  See the chart above for guidance on primary and secondary metrics for each touchpoint category.

In addition to tracking more specific metrics, be sure to think through how long you actually need mass media to establish that link between the brand and the social experience.  At some point, it will make sense to dial down these secondary, mass touchpoints and shift some part of those (expensive) resources to (often more affordable) supporting touchpoints.

Note how different this approach is compared to traditional B2C media planning.  Instead of planning around TV and bolting on social media as an afterthought (unlikely to be well integrated), social experience is now at the center.

Consequently, one side benefit is that social media dollars won’t be the first on the chopping block when budgets get tight.  Protecting that funding is critical for supporting the longer-term asset that many social media investments represent.

MLC Members: Download the full case study, illustrating examples of touchpoint role assignment and measurement.  Happy planning!  In the social revolution, you’ve nothing to lose but your mass media chains.

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.

That’s a mouthful.  Let’s unpack it.  An “imprinting experience” is one that is likely to stick with a consumer.  The best experiences therefore should be meaningful—they would help a consumer solve a problem or connect with others around a shared passion or challenge.  (MLC Members: for help finding these opportunities for your brand, see our work on emotional differentiation and Shared Values)

So far, so good.  But how do you choose amongst multiple social experience options?

Ultimately, you’d want to filter the list of potential experiences to choose one that best highlights your brand’s differentiators.  If you can spur these kinds of social experiences for your consumers, you’re much more likely to create lasting advantage in the marketplace.

Let’s go back to Best Buy and Twelpforce.  Against its prime competitors—Amazon and Walmart—Best Buy has a unique differentiator: an army of Blue Shirts who have a passion for electronics and are social media savvy.  Perfect!

The experience that Best Buy would love to create for its target audience, then, is a strong service interaction with a Blue Shirt via Twelpforce.  And Best Buy would want that interaction to help its customers solve a problem—maybe setting up a new home theater system or identifying a compatible backup mobile phone battery. 

Why put a Twelpforce experience and not an in-store experience at the center of a communications strategy?  In-store isn’t a bad idea, but think about the Twelpforce experience for a minute:

• It’s novel to have a great support experience via social media, and
• It’s easy to pass that interaction virally, and
• The interaction is captured digitally for all to see on Twitter, whereas a good in-store interaction is seen by the customer himself, and maybe a few others around him.

Very tough for Amazon or Walmart to mimic that kind of experience.

Once you’ve identified the experience, you want to scale it with your integrated communications.  You can do that by assigning specific roles to each touchpoint in the mix.  I’ll explain how in my next post.

MLC members can take a look at an illustrative example of a beer brand applying this sort of thinking to choose its social experience in our case on Experience Driven Touchpoint Planning.

Most B2C marketers take the “tonnage” approach to touchpoint planning.  They work back from growth goals and volume targets to plan their touchpoint mix—their mix models tell them how much money they need to dump into broadcast, out-of-home, print, promotions and the like, to hit those volume targets.  Social and experiential touchpoints play second fiddle, at best. 

But, as many pundits suggest, if the true promise of social media lies in the relationship experiences that brands can create—and scale—for their target consumers, touchpoint planning should look very different.

Instead, planning should work back not from growth goals, but from a desired social experience we want consumers to have—ideally with one another, and of course around the brand.  Marketers should start by identifying that critical experience, and then structure broader media to play specific roles around and in support of the social experience.  In this approach, the role of broadcast media is to help scale that experience.

In fact, we’ve seen this idea at play in practice.  Full credit here to Brad Santeler, now at Abbott Labs, who turned us onto this idea.  While working as the head of media and relationship management with Kimberly-Clark several years ago, Brad structured an “inside-out” media planning approach that put digital media at the center of touchpoint planning (this was prior to the rise of social media these last few years).

Among the (several) open questions with this approach:

• How should marketers identify the social experience to put at the center?  
• How should marketers assign roles to different touchpoints? 
• How can marketers mitigate the risk of breaking from mix models? 

I’ll offer my musings in upcoming posts.

MLC members, get an in-depth profile of the “Inside-Out” approach that Brad Santeler implemented.  Or, take a look at the experience-driven touchpoint planning approach we’ve drawn up. Let us know what you think!