Daoism and Marketing Planning

A pretentious title for a very short post. But it is relevant.

One of the problems that I have hit over and over when managing a marketing department, is the confusion and difficulty with planning. Ignoring cliches like “Failing to plan is planning to fail”, genuinely what is the purpose of planning for say a six month or even 12 month cycle? It certainly takes up a lot of time, few people enjoy it, and the annual plan is generally gathering dust c. end of January.

I'm not going to refute this statement at all. In fact I'm going to double down! The first and most important point is to remember the difference between strategy and planning. To simplify, planning is obviously the process of working out who's doing what, timescales, dependencies and so on. Strategy is a very different beast of course - understanding how and why you are going to win.

But, going back to planning, why is it largely a waste of time?

One of my great Christmas presents this year was the book by Jean Boulton, the dao of complexity.

The book is obviously not just about marketing. Really it is about how you handle complex problems like marketing and advertising

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This is the actual reality of planning. It is complex and dynamic, showing a lot of emergence

Again, what does this have to do with anything useful?

The mistake I see over and over is too much faith in the plan, ignoring evidence during the implementation process. Why does this happen? Because we believe we can predict the future , despite the extraordinary complexity. Predicting the future of a marketing campaign is difficult enough even before contact with reality. As soon as your campaign goes out, you realise all of the subtleties and complexities for which you could never plan.

Do you just give up with planning? No, but I believe you need to move to a mode, where you are continuously planning and adjusting. I think one week iterations are the optimal planning time, and crucially with a willingness to adjust constantly even if those are quite big swings. To quote Warren Buffett:

When the facts change, I change my mind

You may have a plan but you need to be prepared to change it every week if necessary If the data indicates something is wrong..

Again, this doesn't mean to say you don't have a strategy, a direction, a deep understanding of your customers their needs and your unique value proposition. what it means is that you are willing to take multiple paths there taking into account the week by week changes in the market.