Copernicus
Marketing Consulting and Research
HABIT Connect Inputs to Outputs
5
in Marketing Plans and
Compulsively Implement Them
Five Questions That Highly Effective Marketers Can
Answer About Their Marketing and Implementation Plans
1. Do our marketing plans cover objectives, strategy, tactics, costs,
and estimates of ROI? Are each of these described clearly and in
detail? Are the objectives specific, realistic, and measurable?
2. Have we done modeling to connect the dots in our marketing
plans, to tie together strategy, tactics, investments, and
objectives? Or to predict what would happen if we change one
element of the plan?
3. Do we test our marketing programs for both new and established
products and services before we do an expensive national
introduction? Does our testing system provide us with diagnostic
information we can employ to improve performance? Does it lead
to specific recommendations?
4. Have we developed a checklist for each element of the plan that
is necessary for success? Have we put a system in place for
assuring conformity to our strategies and plans?
5. Have we integrated every aspect of the marketing program? Are
we absolutely certain that the targeting and positioning decisions
made earlier are reflected in our advertising, PR, direct marketing,
sales activities, packaging, and other areas? That everything we
do communicates the same message to the same people?
• Bringing Science to Marketing and Marketing to the Center of the Business Solar System
With all the elements of a marketing strategy—targeting,
positioning, product/service design, pricing, advertising and
media—in place, COMPANIES NEXT DEVISE A PLAN
OF ATTACK, usually in the form of a 100+ page, full-color
book with beautiful graphics and illustrations. It’s called “The
Annual Marketing Plan” and it certainly looks and sounds
impressive. Yet if you ask most marketers how they know, if
they do all the things and spend the money as outlined in the
annual marketing plan, they will generate the increase in sales
they expect, you get a blank stare. The answer is that they
don’t know.
The fact is most marketing plans at most major companies
are developed without any real knowledge of the relationship
between marketing inputs and outputs. Top management
sets sales and profit objectives without any real insight into
whether they can be achieved. These objectives are only
remotely related to the strategy.
Whether we’re talking about a marketing plan for a new
product or service or an established one, when inputs are
unrelated to outputs, companies have little way of knowing
before launch if a plan will work or if there is a way to improve
it to generate even more sales and profits. Most marketers
can only hope and pray for the best, but we haven’t seen any
marketing miracles.
When it comes to implementing the marketing plan, things
break down even further. We have found that the more people
on an implementation team, the less of the original plan gets
executed. Everyone has a better idea about how to increase
sales or build awareness, replacing plan elements with their
“new and improved” notions.
Everyone understands why a marketing plan is important.
It’s the key to the transition from strategy to tactics. Highly
effective marketers, however, don’t rely on divine intervention
and good luck to develop the marketing plan. They don’t just
push their people harder to execute a new plan. Instead, they
take the Copernican approach to marketing planning and
implementation.
The Copernican Approach to
Marketing Planning and Implementation
Planning
It’s now possible to develop a marketing plan that takes into
account marketing inputs and outputs and establishes the
relationships between them. Copernican Modeled Marketing
Plans™ use marketing management expertise, best practices
automation tools, and the latest developments in modeling
technology to set specific and realistic objectives and achieve
measurable outcomes, including campaign penetration, sales,
and profitability.
MARKETING PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION
The Copernican Discovery™, our proprietary forecasting
technology, provides the scientific underpinnings of Modeled
Marketing Plans™. FIRST, we identify all marketing
inputs and outputs. A company can directly affect some of
these elements—pricing, advertising spending, promotion
spending—others indirectly—the retailer’s relationship with a
distributor, for example. We gather information not only about
a client’s marketing process, but also about the competition’s,
using multiple sources of information.
NEXT we model the relationship between all the factors in
the process using the Copernican Discovery™, generating
a month-by-month forecast. Discovery™ also allows clients
to experiment with alternative spending plans and conduct
sensitivity analysis to evaluate every plan ingredient in terms
of its effects on sales, profits, or both.
We also use the Copernican Discovery™ and simulated test
marketing—the single most validated tool in all of marketing
research—to help clients launch new products and services.
A well-done simulated test market (STM) reduces risks that
include not only lost marketing and sales dollars, but also
capital—the expense of installing production lines or building
a new service infrastructure.
Implementation
A good marketing plan is not enough, however. Copernican
Marketing Implementation ToolsSM, a combination of
proprietary methods and metrics, help clients align their
organization—structure, systems, staff, work process, and
management mentality—with the strategy and plan.
www.copernicusmarketing.com
FIRST we work collaboratively with clients to understand who the
people are within a company who will impact success along the way
and identify their needs, desires, motivations, attitudes, preferences,
capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses. Based on this important
information, we next develop an action plan for channeling strengths
and fixing the weaknesses that prevent successful execution. We
create a checklist of requirements for each department or division
involved in implementing the marketing plan.
FINALLY, we monitor execution to ensure on-time completion
of each item on the checklist and modify to perfection the
marketing strategy and plan based on customer feedback.
THE END RESULT of a Copernicus marketing planning
engagement is a recommendation for a plan that will achieve
management’s sales and profit objectives and/or a forecast for what
a client can expect to achieve given a certain budget. Marketers
come away with a better idea of how they will do and what to
do to improve performance for a new or established product or
service before spending any money on a real-world launch.
Likewise, the end result of a Copernicus implementation
engagement is a more unified organization working more
effectively and efficiently towards achieving the objectives of a
plan, dramatically improving the probability of marketing success.
For more information about the Copernican approach to
marketing planning and implementation, contact Copernicus
Marketing Consulting and Research at (781) 392-2500 or
info@copernicusmarketing.com or visit our award-winning
website, www.copernicusmarketing.com.
© 2006 Copernicus Marketing Consulting and Research