Marketing Planning

Marketers say, “you had me at hello” when the conversation is about complexity in the marketplace. No one doubts that there is more diversity among consumers, more fragmentation in media consumption behavior, more marketing choices and more ways to buy. And, no one doubts that the pace of change is accelerating.

How has the media industry responded? Publishers are busy scrambling to find business models that work. Agencies and brands divided their attention, but they didn’t conquer. On the digital side, agencies and brands make mad dashes from one popular site de jour to the next and embrace a “test and learn” approach. Yet, on the traditional media side, they remain rooted in the long, slow march of annual planning.

Planning is all about reducing risks. Traditionally, marketers plan annually, aligned with the cycle of TV and print media buying. The planning timeframe would typically address only the following year. The key stakeholders form an executive committee where the marketer makes recommendations based on insights and analytics of historical spend data and aggregations of consumer data, which becomes foundational to the plan. 

As the author pointed out in the article If User-Level Data is Too Costly, Look into Alternatives, we live in a highly connected world where real-time access to news, data, and information has transformed the way both people and businesses make decisions. 

I recently saw an interesting article about how more marketing decisions are being made by computers.  The idea is that the decisions will be based on hard facts instead of hunches and emotional biases.  While I applaud the increase in rational thinking, and the use of hard facts instead of hunches, I dispute the assertion that human factors should be removed entirely.