Thursday, September 16, 2010

Which Came First: The Chicken, Or The Budget For The Chicken?

Every Monday I scratch my head and wonder what I’m going to write about this week, and usually by Tuesday it’s figured out for me.

This week no sooner had I raked the dandruff from my scalp when a marketing pal came despairing my way, crawling barelegged through the berber, his personal electronics trailing behind him, clutching his bewhiskered throat and gasping for air.

“Marketing-plan time again?” I asked, and he nodded. His throat and tongue were too parched and swollen for him to speak.

I gave him a swig of Diet Mountain Dew and he perked up imperceptibly. “What is it now?” I asked. “Budgets?” He nodded. “Projects – to-do list?” He nodded again. “Sales – as in, how does all this mesh with what sales wants to do?” He nodded one more time.

“Sit down,” I said, though he preferred to remain in a fetal position on the floor. “I know just what you’re going though.” And from there I proceeded to enlighten him thuswise:

Marketing plans are bigger minefields than the Afghan interstate system. They are the no-win document to end all no-win documents. If they’re detailed, they’re unreadably long. If they’re kept short, they’re vague and unsubstantiated. If they involve other departments they’re too ambitious. If they stick to marketing-department actions they ignore the intertwined reality. If they only focus on marketing tactics to achieve sales goals they ignore the broader picture. If they speak too much to achieving the corporate mission they ignore sales. If they’re designed to function within a budget they lack vision and creativity. If they reach for the moon they’re dismissed as pie-in-the-sky twaddle. And you’re gonna be held to what you say, unless we decide to hold you to something else – but if we do decide to hold you to something else, we’re not going to tell you.

And not only does a marketing department need to have one of these delightful documents, they need it done and on the CEO’s desk by Monday.

Here’s the deal: You’re not going to win with a marketing plan. You just aren’t. Five people are going to complain about strategy, three are going to rip on tactics, accounting is absolutely going to lay one down over the budget, and at least one yabbo is going to grouse over the cover design.

Confronted with all that, what do most marketing directors do? They say, “To heck with it,” and call in their cum laude graduate of the Garden Party School of Marketing (motto: “You can’t please everyone, so you gotta please yourself”) to do the marketing plan.

Bad wrong, or as they say in Australia, wrong bad.

Okay, the first part is right. The essential first step in creating a minimally unsuccessful marketing plan is acknowledging that a marketing plan exists so people who aren’t in marketing can hold you accountable for things you shouldn’t be held accountable for. The success or failure of a product, for instance. Now, marketing is at the locus of taking a product from the lab to the market, but if the product is bad when R&D says it’s good, is it marketing’s fault? If the sales force treats the product the way a threatened senator treats a presidential visit, is it marketing’s fault?

You know the answer to this question. It is: Yes. You should have seen it coming. Acknowledge it and move on.

The second imperative is to treat the relationship among budget, tactics, and outcomes like you really understand it. Essentially, a marketing plan says, “I plan on doing x, costing y, to achieve z.” At some point you’ll be asked to defend each component as well as the logical string, and the circumstances which made this necessary in the first place, but that’s no surprise. You simply have to be prepared to answer the questions -- and it’s your choice whether you do it inside or outside of the marketing plan.

The nice thing about intertwining budget, tactics, and outcomes in a marketing plan is that you acknowledge that marketing costs money (which accounting loves), and that expenditures and tactics – “hard” tactics like products and “softer” ones like press releases – are going directly toward outcomes, which sometimes go by the sobriquet of “sales.” This makes Sales happy, though Sales is easily pleased. In the corporate menagerie Sales is the Poky Little Puppy.

To justify the title, this approach acknowledges that if you want a chicken you have to budget for one. You can’t simply hope that Product Development lays an egg.

The third point, which is less an imperative than a really strong suggestion, is to minimize numbers everywhere in a marketing plan, forward and background, hard numbers and projections, dollars and units. You can hide behind numbers; I get that. And so does everyone else. Besides, marketing departments come in two flavors: the kind where they believe your numbers and the kind where they don’t. If they believe your numbers you don’t have to put them in the marketing plan because if people believe your numbers they believe most everything else you say. If they don’t believe your numbers all you do by putting numbers in the marketing plan is open yourself up to ridicule.

You’re going to be questioned, so you might as well say, “This is the way it is,” using words (revolutionary, I know), and then haul up your numbers to answer a specific question.

I know it seems counterintuitive in the age of MEM (Measuring Everything Marketing) to eschew numbers in a marketing plan, but a marketing plan isn’t about hitting numbers; it’s about employing strategies to get to a point where the numbers will occur. It’s about doing to achieve; costs are a throughput. In the movie Chicken Run the nutty prisoner professor chicken lays out the mathematical case for a chicken flying, but when they actually launch the chicken according to the numbers, what happens? Chicken splat. The chickens don’t get off the ground until they ditch the math and devise strategies for getting off the ground.

Sweet philosophy, but you can’t abandon numbers entirely in a marketing plan. However, if you save the stats for costs and outcomes and let your vendors supply the former and Sales the latter, you can keep building the road. Math will tell you how fast to go in the corners.

Employ this strategy and you can get through a marketing plan in five pages – 10, tops. If you’re not there, try axing the season recap and the eight pages of market-share pie charts and the Post-It budget and five years of sales numbers and the SWOT analyses of competitors’ janitorial services and see where you are. You are not your organization’s Homer. You are not writing the definitive history of Wiffman’s Waffles. You’re starting at a spot and moving forward in a tightly defined direction, and describing the path as succinctly as possible.

“Yes,” my parched friend croaked. “Yes, but – what do you do when what you say you’re going to do next year doesn’t line up with what you’re doing now?”

“Choose,” I said. “Actually, you have to build in a change of direction, wrap up what you’re doing now if you need to, and then lay out where you need to go from there. You can’t ignore the present, but you also can’t spend so much time and effort documenting what got you to the present that you lose sight of what’s going to make for a better future.

“That do it for you?” I asked, but my friend, still curled in the fetal position, was unresponsive. Dead – or worse.

“Plumb tuckered out,” I whispered, leaving the office and closing the door softly behind me. “And the CEO still needs a plan on his desk by Monday.”

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