Management Bug: Lack of Marketing Strategy

A MngtBug is a problem, cause or impact in a human manager’s decision which produces an incorrect or unexpected result. Every other week we share a little bit of our knowledge base on social media and our newsletter.

This week’s MngtBug is…

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Description

This week’s “Lack of Marketing Strategy” is a common problem in many companies either big or small.

By definition, a marketing strategy is a business’s overall game plan for reaching people and turning them into customers of the product or service that the business provides. The marketing strategy of a company contains the company’s value proposition, key marketing messages, information on the target customer and other high-level elements.
(Extracted from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketing-strategy.asp)

More businesses than ever are involved in some form of marketing, whether it is through social media, blogging, email or snail mail. Yet, according to the Content Marketing Institute, only 40% of B2C and 37% of B2B marketers had a documented strategy in 2016. Although it is a slight increase from the previous year─37% (B2C) and 32% (B2B)─there is still a significant percentage of businesses that haven’t taken the time to flesh out their strategy.

What does it mean for those businesses? Would you build a house without blueprints and a thorough plan? No, you wouldn’t know what materials you need, what types of contractors to hire, or how big your budget needs to be to cover the costs. Hundreds of other variables would be unknown, and every decision would be made based on risky guesses with little reassurance that it would turn out as you wanted.

It is the same for building a business. Why would you start writing content, designing flyers, or posting social media without a marketing plan? If you start creating content and spitting it out, how do you know that is effective?

Without a marketing strategy, you are at worst, putting your business at risk. At best, you are wasting resources and money on efforts when you have no idea if they will work.
(Extracted from https://www.10twelve.com/blog-news-events-resources/2017/3/4/how-your-lack-of-marketing-strategy-can-hurt-your-business)

The absence of a marketing plan is the sure path to the death of a brand.
Is your brand on the way to being forgotten or, on the contrary, is it becoming more and more a part of consumers’ lives?

How do you know?

An exercise that has proven to be extremely useful in helping others to think about the present and future of the brand is precisely to force the answer to the question: what would happen if your brand ceased to exist? is inspired by the work of Bill Taillor (source) and Denise Lee Yohn (source) and consists of challenging people (employees, customers, stakeholders) to write the brand obituary.

An obituary is a news article that reports the recent death of a person, typically along with an account of the person’s life and information about the upcoming funeral. It’s not the most pleasant thought, it’s true! but it helps the process of imagining what it would be like if the brand we interact with every day ceased to exist.

Its main goal is to spark a dialogue about the brand’s “reason for being” — generating a rich discussion and revealing points of consensus and disagreement.
(Extracted from https://medium.com/@gjmendes/what-would-happen-if-your-brand-ceased-to-exist-83efc232b964 Special Thanks to Gustavo Mendes)

Known Associates

This MngtBug has been mentioned in relation to a number of MngtFixes such as…

“Customer Needs and Wants Elicitation”,
“Company Strategy Definition”,
“Sales Strategy Definition”,
“Target Customers Definition and Segmentation”,
“Customer Journey Definition”,
and of course “Marketing Strategy Definition”!

Call to action

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Have a nice week and remember…
Human Managers should strive to be humans while managing and be managed as humans!