The Building Blocks to Boost Your Brand

Today’s need to develop and execute state-of-the-art marketing programs that offer impact, accountability, transparency, and evaluation calls for effective marketing planning. A well-written marketing plan that captures its output will help secure a brand’s future and contribution to the company.

By Bob Girondi

An essential ingredient for success in any business is sound strategic marketing planning. And, it is this process—coupled with a clearly written marketing plan that appropriately conveys its findings and approved decisions to all stakeholders—that enables the orderly thinking, decision making, implementation, evaluation, and timely adjustments required to compete effectively in today’s dynamic healthcare marketplace.

A logical approach to the Strategic Marketing Planning process can be seen in the following three-phase, 13-step process.

1. Planning Phase
a. Vision
b. Mission Statement
c. SWOT Analysis
d. Situational Analysis
e. Goals/Objectives
f. Strategies
g. Tactics
h. Budgets/Projections/Timelines/Responsibilities
2. Implementation Phase
a. Implementation
3. Outcome Evaluation/Corrective Action
(Knowledge Management) Phase
a. Feedback Collection
b. Measurement
c. Analysis
d. Adjustment

Even when the value of good strategic marketing planning is well understood and conscientiously
practiced, the effort, too often, can be wasted.

Constant changes in Brand Team structure, in the absence of a complete and clearly written Brand Marketing Plan, can induce a loss of Brand memory. This, in turn, can produce a lack of true understanding of how a Brand has performed—especially as it relates to Management’s expectations. The objective of this brief article is to offer a solution to what can be a critical problem with long-term consequences.

Why a Marketing Plan
Rudyard Kipling wrote:
I keep six honest serving men,
They taught me all I knew;
Their names are What and Why and When,
And How and Where and Who.
—from “The Elephant’s Child” in Just So Stories

The Brand Marketing Plan captures the answers to the same questions (plus How Much!) in a single document, essentially capturing the information that is relevant and important to the organization’s operational purposes for a specific period of time—generally, a single 12-month business year (calendar or fiscal, as appropriate).

While Marketing Plans can be executed for longer periods (typically three to five years), such plans have less practical utility from an operational perspective, requiring revisions at the end of each business year. While this multiple-year approach is valuable to the brand’s organization for extended planning purposes, the basic value of a Marketing Plan is the operational perspective it offers for the business year immediately at hand.

At the very least, a Marketing Plan should borrow liberally from what was produced by the eight steps of the Planning Phase of the strategic marketing planning process.

The Basics
Structurally, a typical Marketing Plan should contain the following elements:

• Title Page with the date, author(s), topic of the Plan (product, product line, SBU, etc.), and the period for which the Plan was prepared
• Table of Contents includes page numbers
• Executive Summary gives a maximum one-page overview of the entire Plan
• Vision Statement offers a long-range, high-level perspective for the Brand
• Mission Statement provides a clear, thoughtful sense of purpose that specifies the current business opportunity and includes a Value Proposition that explains what the Brand offers right now
• SWOT Analysis reviews the Brand’s internal and external Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
• Situational Analysis gives internal and external perspectives that are derived from the SWOT Analysis
• General Goals and Objectives are specific and quantified, include timing, and are derived from the results of the Situational Analysis—in order of priority
• Strategies explain how the marketing variables (Product, Pricing, Distribution, and Promotion) will be used to satisfy your Objectives
• Tactics are the specific tools that will be employed to operationalize the strategies selected to achieve the Brand’s stated Objectives
• Budgets and Projected Forecasts include sales, expenses, etc.
• Timelines encompass sales, expenses, and activities (including support activities such as Sales, Market Research, IT, R&D, etc., which may not be within the Brand’s budgets)
• References are source documents that offer explanations that may be required

The Value of This Process
The dynamics of the current marketing environment in pharma demand that we be equally dynamic in our responses. The use of an effective Marketing Plan helps make our responses timely, coordinated, effective, and meaningful.

Here are a dozen specific ways you will find a Marketing Plan, in support of the Strategic Marketing Planning process, to be of value to the Brand Team.

The complete and well-written Marketing Plan:

• Organizes our thinking by forcing us to write everything down
• Is actionable
• Forces us to focus our energies, activities, and discussions
• Helps us recognize and respond to the important differences between general data and specific actionable information
• Facilitates decision making and prioritization of the Brand’s activities
• Enables and recognizes collaboration between the Brand Team and its support teams
• Helps Management recognize the value of the Brand Team’s efforts by enhancing the understanding of the value of recommended activities, as well as specifically what would be lost by excluding or cutting various programs and their budgets
• Offers a complete picture of the Brand’s current situation and related opportunities in a single document
• Is measurable, offering accountability relative to both economics and activities
• Offers an easy-to-understand road map for all those charged with implementation, including benchmarks that may be monitored and evaluated throughout the operational year
• Enables creation of a standard corporate template that allows Management to effectively and efficiently view and evaluate an array of Marketing Plans all vying for the same resources
• Ensures Brand continuity by having everything that is important to the Brand written down and appropriately distributed so changes in Brand Team personnel do not produce confusion or the need to recreate all the hard work, analyses, and recommendations of the team that last managed the Brand

The Marketing Director to whom I reported in my first Product Management assignment often said: “Don’t tell anyone you’ve been a Product Manager unless you first successfully implement a Marketing Plan created by someone else, then develop and implement one you’ve created, and, finally, develop one that can be successfully implemented by your successor!” Today’s marketing environment doesn’t allow for the luxury of this three-year cycle, so we must respond by doing the best we can with available resources. The proper application of the Strategic Marketing Planning process—with its output captured in the form of a well-written and appropriately disseminated Marketing Plan to ensure effective implementation and continuity—can effectively serve you and your Brand(s). Try it. I believe you’ll like the results!

Bob Girondi has extensive experience on the corporate, agency, and service sides of our business and is currently EVP/Marketing and Research for Communications Media, Inc. (CMI). He is also an Adjunct Professor of Marketing at the Temple University Fox School of Business & Management. He can be reached at rgirondi@cmimedia.com.

SUGGESTED READING
For those interested in reading more on the subject of Marketing Plans, here are two
recommended readings:

Breakthrough Marketing Plans
by Tim Calkins of the Kellogg School of Management. Published by Palgrave MacMillan (2008).

Based on Mr. Calkins’s research and personal experience, his text offers 161 pages of a simply stated approach to this important process. Just a few charts, but it does include a Marketing Plan, Template, a Breakthrough Marketing Plan example, and the answers to some Common Questions on the topic—all in an easy-to-read writing style.

The Marketing Plan Handbook
(3rd Edition) by Marian Burk Wood. Published by Pearson Prentice Hall (2008).

With a more traditional textbook-style approach, this handbook includes a sample plan, a series of checklists within each chapter, and more than 100 examples of practical value. Includes a CD-ROM of Marketing Plan Pro from Palo Alto Software that helps walk a user through the process. I’ve used this as a supplemental text in my intensive writing capstone classes in Strategic Marketing Planning for marketing majors for several years and find it to be of value.

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