Praise of the Marketing Plan

To complement last year’s article Death of the Marketing Plan, I offer the eulogy of the Marketing Plan as delivered in this year’s Blitz Rounds at HSMAI Business Strategy Week. Enjoy!

First of all, I want to thank everyone for being here today to at the very least pretend to mourn the loss of our dear old colleague, The marketing plan. I first met MP in 1991 at our annual marketing meeting. Say what you might say about the former MP, but he was remarkable in his ability to stick around long after his usefulness expired.

It was a sturdy thing, at least two inches thick, with three SHARP METAL CLAWS holding it together.

MP was the guardian of the ideal customer profile, the guardian of the brand language and the guardian of the guidelines for print advertising.

He loved bringing people together to decide what they would do nine months later to increase sales and revenue, although he never paid much attention to how things might change during those nine months. month. Funny guy, this deputy.

For years, I flipped through its pages and ticked boxes as I executed those plans, valiantly determined a year in advance in a meeting room devoid of a crystal ball. Sometimes checking its boxes gave a high return on investment; most of the time, the only thing he brought back was hours of hard work with no impact on the bottom line.

MP has seen the world change: the advent of the PC, the Internet and the iPhone. He was around when real-time data analytics emerged. He lived through the rise of online reservations and digital payment. Never changing anything, her binder set Stallworth on the shelf, carving a finished line of dust around its black cover.

We’ve stuck with MP, pulling it off the shelf at the end of each year to prepare for the next. While he wouldn’t change, the world around him was in turmoil. The language was changing and the rules of engagement were becoming complex. Print ads were replaced by banner ads and poster campaigns, and organic was trending on the web and in our local Whole Foods.

By the end, MP knew no one was going to turn to Page 327 for a backup plan after a failed Google Ads campaign. He knew the tech-driven, instant gratification world we lived in was making him stale, and he had a long time to come to terms with that.

MP wouldn’t want us to be sad. He wants us to embrace our new flexibility beyond static written pages. He wanted us to write one page at a time, starting the second page only when we knew the effect of the first.

To make marketing more effective, we need to move to dynamic, real-time marketing like Instagram Stories showing experiences as they happen, bringing our brand to life for our customers WITH our customers.

MP has never known the luxury of last minute deals on our favorite booking platforms or the ability to BOOK NOW! PM only “call to action” was in the final snap of its three metal rings, indicating that our planning was complete… 9 months before we knew what we needed!

This brings us to a new word never spoken in an AGILE marketing meeting. The definition of agility is the ability to move quickly and easily.

Marketing in today’s world is not about planning; it’s about having the ability to go fast; it means being well trained and ready to race despite the forecast. The only planning we can do is to budget the funds to support the strategy that our future will require.

Our awareness strategies used to be on the pages of magazines, where glowing photos of us at our best were placed on glossy pages with high subscriber rates. It wasn’t a strategy at all; it was bound in the HOPE that the consumer would remember us later as they flipped through their AAA travel journal and decided which hotel 800 number to call.

Today’s outreach strategy has evolved; it happens where the consumer is, not where we hope they will be, and when perfected, it is done for us by the consumer saying it on their social media pages or by word of mouth. Strategies today must deliver real-time content to a targeted customer with a 2-second attention span.

Let us stop for a moment of silence to mourn the passing of our old friend MP. It is gone and hopefully SOON forgotten by owners and CEOs. We are no longer the authors of a fictional story about how we will achieve budgets; instead, we are historians documenting our failures and successes of the moment, telling what worked, when, and how.

We are digital; we are paperless; we are fluidly multitasking tablet-carrying executives in a world that has solved all inefficiencies with some form of technology.

This year, let’s do things differently.

As we put together our typical marketing plan materials, put together our strategies and attach points of accountability to a dynamic plan that evolves with us. A plan never definitive enough to pinch your fingers in the binder because as soon as one page is executed, the second is already being written.

Take the marketing off the shelf and put it in the game where it deserves to be shown in a new light. This year we will have a marketing plan, but ours will not be on the shelf; it will be in everything we do.

You will see it in the dedication of our teams and the exuberance of our guests. It will change as needed, at present, as new opportunities are identified.

I declare “Death of the Marketing Plan”, bury the 3-ring binders and burn the shelves, because that’s not where the strategy lies.

Marketing strategy is alive in those who are passionate enough to wear the badge and serve customers who aspire to “feel” something beyond what they can identify in words. It’s a realization that something here is different; it is the consideration of accepting something that takes you out of your comfort zone and turns into a memory not soon forgotten. Since when was the memory strategy as a KPI written into a Marketing Plan?

Success is not in “Return on ad spend”; success lies in the engineering experiences at these annual marketing meetings that create awareness in our target audience, an awareness that sparks curiosity and inspires them to consider converting a reservation.

TO BREATHE!! Everyone searches for that once-in-a-lifetime Instagrammable moment, on TikTok between business trips and lights up their feeds with envious posts that take them out of their daily grind.

Marketing creates a story whose end result is a memory that is not soon forgotten.

That my friends can’t be found in a filing cabinet or on a shelf

• Marketing is dynamic,
• Marketing is fluid and
• Marketing happens in real time.

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