Do You Have An Innie Or An Outie (Marketing Plan, That Is)?

I'm hardly one to begin pining for Fall. As a native Minnesotan, August brings about a certain sense of urgency as the days get a little shorter, trips to the stores for school supplies begin to creep into our to-do lists, and, like the neurotic creatures we are, we complain bitterly about the heat and humidity without any sense of irony that for much of the year we live under the Arctic circle. Or Canada. Whatever.

So it pains me to write today's column and make my readers think about 2011 marketing budgets and planning. Bear with me.

Yesterday morning, my colleague Dawn Hepper (@dhepper) forwarded me a recent research study conducted by Forbes (a much lesser business magazine that this one here) indicating the top concerns for marketers as they head into 2011 planning. (You may need a login. Get one. Always good stuff from these guys.) While as a digital marketer I found many of the themes refreshing -- a fantastic focus on ROI being just one of them -- others were fascinating in their inward focus. Of the top 9 concerns, a full eight of them were full-on navel-gazing.

Here they are, in order:

Make marketing more strategic and impactful within the organization
Senior executives demand some justification for the money we're spending
Improve marketing team accountability
Increased competitive pressures
Financial pressures
Changes in consumer behavior
Need to improve business planning
Need to guide product development
Need to improve advertising agency relationship and effectiveness

In that list, you'll notice only one that addresses the single critical concern that, if executed against properly, may take care of many of the others: Changes in consumer behavior. Those four words are what's creating the anxiety through all the others. Readers of this blog know that I am a rabid proponent of listening as a key skill marketers must master. Yet, this list of concerns indicates that many marketers are heading into 2011 planning in a vacuum of consumer silence. Doing so seems circus-like in its death defying assumptions. Might as well start jumping out of planes with no parachute -- just for the fun of it.

The challenge before us for the next several months is to commit to looking outside ourselves rather than inside our organizations when planning for next year. Yesterday morning I also received another link to an article entitled "Social Media and Executives Don't Mix." Please read it. It provides several clear and compelling arguments for how to get beyond the fear of the unknown, how to thrive in a world where we no longer have total control over our brands, and how to tap online conversations for product improvements. The media landscape in which we compete requires near constant outward focus on changing consumer behaviors. It's their behaviors -- ours, really -- that are creating both our consternation and ridiculously awesome opportunities to make better, more authentic connections, not lesser ones. But ya just ain't gonna get there talking about it amongst yourselves over some box lunches.

So I dare you to not talk for one minute about what you're going to do next year until you've spent as least twice as long finding out what your audiences want. You'll do so by listening to and mining your data, surveying your customers and sales organization for "boots on the ground" indicators, and looking under every rock and in every nook and cranny for insights into what the consumer is telling you. I guarantee that if you do so the other concerns outlined in the Forbes study will either go away or become much less stressful.

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Andrew Eklund :: Founder & CEO
Ciceron :: Digital Marketing
www.ciceron.com
612.230.3901 :: LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreweklund
Professional Twitter: @HeavyThinking
Personal Twitter: @aeklund