Marketing: Let's get into action - Fresh look to marketing plans

Financial Times' Management blog invited Tim Calkins, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University to talk about new trends in Marketing. 

Nowadays, getting information about costumers is easier that it ever was. The main driver (wasnt't it always) today is action. 

The challenge is not anymore: "How do I know more about my costumer?", but "What are we going to do?"

This change in the set of mind should lead to a change in the tools used in your marketing plans.

A Marketing plan is nothing but a simple document explaining how your company is going to get into the market and compete with your competitors: "This is how we are going to build the business".

Marketing plans necessarily should concentrate mainly in three components:

1. Objectives: What goals do you want to achieve. This is where the numbers are. What market share you need to be succesful, what increase in revenue, etc....
2. Strategic initiatives: The big things that we are going to do: launch a new product, enter a new market, change pricing strategy....
3. Tactics: What precise actions are you going to take in order to get the initiatives to happen (point 2): advertising plans, etc... 

In order to have a good and useful marketing plan, the plan should have these characteristics:

• Be FOCUSED: Not too many things that need to be done, in order to be able to concentrate on the important points.
• Be CLEAR: In order to clearly state what is going to be done, there is no question on what you are really going to do.
• Be COMPELING: Why this is going to work. 

and I would add one point: 

• Be Concise

A side point of a Marketing plan is to convince the whole organization and get support for the tactics and initiatives that need to be put in place. You are not going to succeed with a document with hundreds of pages because simply nobody is going to read it. In addition it will be much more difficult to extract the specific actions from it.  

Professor Calvins insists on the fact that the discussions should focus on the strategic initiatives and not on the tactics or neverending analysis of the situation.

Tim Calvins has published a new book where further information can be found.