Marketing Planning - Key Ingredients

Brand Strategy

Product Strategy

Communications Strategy
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Competitive SWOT
STRENGTHS
WEAKNESS
OPPORTUNITIES
THREATS
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Brand Strategy (use the SWOT as the guide)

Target:
– The audience it is critical the brand win against. It should be tightly defined by
demographic and/or psychographic dimensions
– Consumer or B2B

Target Insight

Pillars (proof)
– What are the key differentiators or reasons why the target audience will want to
choose the brand

–
Is the brand differentiated largely on image or is there significant differentiation on feature/function?
–
Is it a new innovation with no competition
Brand Promise
– This is the singular idea that captures the core differentiated consumer value
proposition for the brand.
– It will help create alignment across all business functions against a core idea
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Product Strategy: Pricing
Premium brand: High price, never on sale
Budget Brand: Lowest price, highly promotional
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Product Strategy: Distribution
 “Hard”
Products
– Direct to consumer
–
Retail
–
Direct
–
Web
–
Phone
– Partner/Reseller Model
– Branded
– White Label
 “Service”
Products
– Scale?
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Communications – Objective setting

Business Objective
– What is the business result the marketing initiative(s) are intended
to drive?
– Sales, Revenue, EBITDA
 Communication
Objective
– What is the consumer result the marketing initiative(s) are
intended to drive?
– Product awareness, store traffic, visits to the website, shifting brand perceptions
* Be as specific as possible!
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Communications - What is the Message?
 Defining
a great key message in a marketing campaign
is an art form
 Too
often marketing communications are ruined by
trying to communicate too many things.
 The
ingredients for a great message:
– Singular
– Focus on the benefit to the target
– Works across all tactics to amplify their effect.
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Communications – The mix

Traditional Advertising: Expensive, broad reach, media mix and
creative execution can dramatically impact success

PR: A good compliment

Social: Hit and miss. Generally better for post sales customer
relationship building

Sponsorship: Brand halo but activation is narrow but highly targeted

Channel: Usually forgotten but perhaps the most important
- The media mix is determined from a number of factors including
the target, the communication objective, the messaging strategy
and budget
- Marketing communications success is usually driven by
measurement and optimization over time. For a lunch plan there is
no magic formula. It is a combination of experience and gut.
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