‘Do better marketing with a marketing plan’

Q: We read your column last month about “Can you do good marketing without a marketing plan?” Our situation is opposite that of the company who wrote about doing so well without a marketing plan.

We’re a medium-size consumer goods company. In addition to a yearly corporate business plan, we also have a written marketing plan for our two major brands since ten years ago when I took over as marketing director.

But over the same period, we’ve had falling sales including profit. The declines were small and slow but in 2008 the decrease was two digits and 2009 was the worst. It stopped in 2010 and we experienced a very slight rise last year. All throughout we had a good marketing plan to direct our efforts.

We have two questions. The first: “Where should we look to find out what’s working against our marketing and marketing planning?” And: “Do you think we will make our life simpler if we do as your previous reader did their marketing, that is, just prepare and follow a calendar of marketing and sales activities for the year based on the company’s business plan?”

A: Adequately answering your questions requires our looking into the details of your marketing and sales operations as well as your year-to-year profitability performance. Since you basically asked a “generic” question, we’ll answer within the same domain of discussion.

One thing we can readily agree on is the reality that there are many factors working against you. That’s aside from the usual external forces in the economy that has become the businessmen’s and business media’s favorite whipping boy.

When you’re searching for those factors working against you, it makes for better understanding if you diagnose for “causes” that are within your control.

External forces are, by definition, outside your control. So even if you find out that one or two of such forces are among the culprits, since they’re outside your control, you can’t do anything about them.

This is not to say that they’re useless. They are useful if only to let you know the boundaries within which to solve your marketing problems.

But consider as well the flip side of your question: “What’s working for you?”

For ten years now, you’ve been a dedicated practitioner of the planning discipline. Your reasonable expectation has been that your Marketing and Sales would, if not now then eventually, be favorably rewarded as a result. However, over the past ten years, you’ve had “falling sales including profit” although those “declines were small and slow.”

In 2008, you had a two-digit decline and 2009 was the worst. But the fall stopped in 2010 and you experienced a slight rise last year. So ask yourself: “How do you know that all these do not count as something actually working for you?”

If you did not have a marketing plan to guide your Marketing and Sales through those years and in those difficult times of 2008 to 2009, would the sales and profit declines have been much more, much worse?

The surprising sales performance of 2010 and especially 2011 appear to be the first sign that at last your persistence in navigating your Marketing and Sales via a marketing plan is starting to pay off.

This brings us to your second question, which is why not do marketing via an annual calendar of marketing and sales activities.

In our “Accountable Marketing” seminar, we avoid labeling the calendar of marketing and sales activities as not at all a marketing plan. We say it’s less than half a plan, about a third of a marketing plan. There’s two-thirds missing parts that guilty marketers have overlooked and sometimes they were not even conscious of the neglectful oversight.

We will not use this occasion to do a Defensor-Santiago-like reprimanding because that will take us nowhere. Instead, we will answer what our MBA students often ask: “How do we transform the calendar of marketing efforts into a full marketing plan and give it its missing two-thirds?”

The in-house version of our Accountable Marketing seminar, participants learn to do this via two workshops. The first workshop asks participants working in small learning groups to specify how much revenue or sales productivity each of their calendared marketing activities will commit to provide.

As basis, they can resort to a historical analysis of such revenue productivities from their accounting records. The second workshop then challenges each learning group to identify the two or three marketing and sales activities that can be bundled to work together for synergy in revenue and profit productivity.

Again, a historical analysis of past accounting records should prove helpful here. We realize how demanding in time and brain energy each of these two integration efforts can become.

But if you’re sincere in doing truly accountable marketing that is empowered to yield synergy to your sales and profitability, then you have to set up for these requirements and execute.

The long-term benefit is simple. You will elevate what you’re doing from good marketing to better marketing; from sub-optimal to optimal marketing.

Last February 25, the Philippine Marketing Association (PMA) invited the Senior MRx-er to be one of the judges of the 11 finalists in PMA’s 2012 Agora Youth Award for the Best Marketing Plan. The Senior MRx-er was seated beside another judge, Jun Umali, president of Gardenia Bakeries Inc. After the 11 presentations, the Senior MRx-er asked Jun: “Why is it that not one of the presentations talked about revenue productivity or about consideration for synergy?” Jun was quick to answer: “Students of marketing planning have yet to learn how to be quantitatively accountable about their marketing plan.”

The Senior MRx-er was also quick to reply: “PMA ought to do something about the marketing planning teachers of those students.”

Keep your questions coming. Send them to us at [email protected] or [email protected]. God bless!