Developing Marketing Strategies and a Marketing Plan

Marketing Plans Begin with Business Plans

You can't develop a marketing strategy until you are clear on what you are wanting to accomplish as a business. Marketing works in conjunction with every other aspect of a business. If a business doesn't have a clear vision of where it wants to go, it is impossible to develop a marketing plan to get you there. This seems basic but you would be amazed how often businesses careen from one idea to the next without an overarching design to their actions.

Every business needs a plan and an overarching philosophy that guides it. From the smallest one person company to the largest multi-national corporation establishing a business plan as a guiding document may be the most powerful tool for success you can have.

There are 7 sections to a business plan:

  • Executive summary- which is written last and provides a synopsis of the plan

  • Company description- Mission and vision statement along with goals

  • Market Analysis- Competition, how the company fills a need

  • Organization and Management- How are you organized? Key personnel, Legal entity (LLC, Corporation, Sole Proprietor) 

  • Product or Service- What do you sell or what do you do?

  • Marketing and Sales- The 4Ps

  • Financial- Start up expenses, current expenditures, Financial projections

All of these have a bearing on the a marketing strategy but to me the key component of the business plan is the mission and vision statement. It defines who you are. Here are some Mission statements:

  • Pepsi-  Create more smiles with every sip and every bite

  • Nike- To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world. *If you have a body, you are an athlete.

  • Apple Computer- To bring the best user experience to customers through innovative hardware, software, and services.

When you have the right mission statement it becomes your guiding light. It should make your heart beat a little faster. Always look up the mission statement of any company you are interviewing with. Whenever you are working for a company and looking at a project or idea for expanding a business or developing a new product you refer back to the mission statement and make sure it aligns with it. If it doesn't, it will strain your resources and pull you in directions as an organization that will work against your core values or mission. It doesn't mean whatever you are looking at isn't a viable business idea but it may mean it's not right for your company.

One of the best guiding philosophies for a corporation I have ever heard laid out was Steve Jobs laying out the core mission for Apple Computer when he returned to become the CEO in the 90s. Jobs had been forced out of Apple Corp a few years after launching the company. After being fired, he started a new computer company called NeXT and then dabbled in the entertainment business by creating a little start up animation company named... Pixar. Apple found itself on life support in the early 90s with less than 5% market share (Microsoft even lent Apple money to stay afloat to avoid possible antitrust action by being the only system software available). 

Fortunately, Jobs had learned a lot about being a CEO and even though NeXT wasn't a huge success, it's new OS called NeXTStep was bought by Apple and Jobs was brought back as the CEO of Apple Corp. It was apparent that Stave Jobs had something that Apple desperately needed: a vision. So he revamped the Apple product line and the OS and relaunched Apple with his vision. Here is the video where he introduced Apple's new commercials and philosophy. It echos even today...

Companies need clearly defined goals that are laid out in a business plan in 1, 3, 5 and 10 year increments. Each goal has at least three objectives that lead you to completion. The farther out the goals are the more ambitious they can be but each plateau of 1, 3, 5, or 10 years gives you a stepping stone to the next goal. When laid out correctly each part of a business (accounting, finance, management, marketing and supply chain) can determine what they will need to do to support the business plan. This applies even if you are a one person company working out of your garage or a musical artist starting your career.

SWOT Analysis

Every company has to be able to look at themselves honestly and figure out what their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are. This is something that is done in the business plan but it is also something you as a marketer must be aware of when developing a marketing strategy. It's really easy to sell yourself on your ideas and think they are brilliant but analyzing them in terms of a truthful SWOT analysis can save you a lot of wasted effort and money. 

The Marketing Plan

Creating a marketing plan is developing a strategy using marketing tools to meet the goals laid out in the business plan. Those goals can vary depending on where you are in your company's life. A start up needs to work on becoming known. A company like Pepsi wants to grow and expand into new markets. There are 4 things you are trying to accomplish: awareness, consideration, conversion and loyalty.

  • Awareness- making people aware of you product or service 

  • Consideration- Having the customer want to learn more about your product

  • Conversion- Converting interest into a sale

  • Loyalty- Repeat business

Everything we do in marketing is focused on one of these 4 elements. Learn these. Meta and Google talk about these ad nauseam. Luckily they are organized into this Marketing Funnel.

It starts wide at the top and gets smaller as the consumer moves down through it which makes sense because not everybody who becomes aware of your product will consider it and even fewer will buy it and fewer still will become loyal customers.

I am a loyal Apple user. I have been since the first Mac. In many ways it has made my career possible. It's hard to imagine anything that will make me switch to a PC. I have worked for Apple and I align with the core philosophy in the Steve Jobs video above even before he made that video. I am definitely in the loyalty section of the marketing funnel and would be considered an promoter of the brand.

The goal for a marketing professional is move people through the marketing funnel, get the sale and hold on to that customer for life. If it costs you $10 to get someone to buy your product through your marketing efforts and the product costs you $15 to make and you sell it for $20... it may seems like you are losing money ($5 on the sale). And maybe you are on the first sale. But if they become a loyal buyer and purchase the product every month, that $10 investment in getting them to buy the product the first time becomes a great investment.

Marketing Metrics

Marketing is awash in metrics and statistics. The internet generates an ungodly amount of numbers for marketers to analyze and contemplate. Remember that data is only as good as the data base and the algorithms used. It is always looking into the past. While it can be a great predictor of future success remember that consumers are people and are not always logical and don't always behave the way the data indicates. If great marketing was able to be accomplished with metrics then every campaign or strategy would be successful. They aren't. So know that human intuition and creativity are major parts of a great marketing strategy.

The best marketing is a great product

In talking to my music artists about their careers, they would often come to me and say, "I have ten songs for an album and I am ready to release it, get a manager and go on tour." My response was always, how good are the songs? If they had only written 10 songs for their album I can almost guarantee you that they probably aren't very good. My wife wrote 65 songs for her first album and only 7 of them made it on her record (some of my favorite songs she has written didn't make the cut). The point is a female artist releasing a record today isn't competing with the female artist performing at her hometown small venue. She is competing with Taylor Swift and she needs to look at it that way. Your music has to be undeniable to have a chance. As one grammy winning artist put it, you have your whole life to write your first album and about 6 months to write your second.

The same thing goes for any product you are trying to market. There is so much noise online and there are so many products that to break through, it needs to be special. You need to know your audience and know what they want and your product must fill that need better than the competition.

Target Market 

After having a good product, the next thing you need to be able to do is define your target market. Who is the audience for what you are selling? Going back to the Taylor Swift example. My wife and I were sitting with all the artists at the CMA awards the first time Taylor Swift was on the show. She had a song called "Tim McGraw" and at 16 years old she was given the chance to sing it to Tim on the broadcast. Great TV, cute moment. She blushed and was a totally awkward teenager. What made Taylor Swift different from every other teenager that was getting a record deal in Nashville at the time was that she was singing about teen angst, breakups and feeling like a misfit. Every other teen act was trying to sound like an adult and competing to appeal to an adult audience (wow, isn't that amazing they sound like a grown up). 

It didn't take long to see the brilliance in how she was being marketed. She became the voice of a generation by becoming the soundtrack to their lives and professing what she and they were going through. Sales exploded, radio that covets the teen market to sell to their advertisers played her non stop. Whether it was by design or it was just where she was coming from in her writing, she had a very specific target market that no other artist was speaking to.

Every product needs to figure out who their target market is. The more specific you can get, the better. You should be able to see someone on the street and confidently tell if they are a potential customer or not. You can break down your audience by demographic characteristics (age, sex, income, location, etc.) and more. Today we often talk in terms of niche marketing. Social media lets us really dig down. The idea is to spend as little as we can to reach the core audience for your product or service to keep marketing efforts efficient and the company profitable. 

What is old is new again

The book talks about Pepsi creating a music group called Now United as a way to promote Pepsi products. Pepsi is a worldwide brand with a huge marketing budget. Whenever you have products that are on the generic side you will see large marketing expenditures. Coke and Pepsi definitely have different formulas but they are similar products that appeal to the same market. Same thing with soap, deodorant and a lot of electronics. There may be slight differences cosmetically but in many cases, the component s are the same. Red Bull is another company that spends a crazy amount of money marketing themselves in unorthodox ways (sponsorships, events, etc).

When I saw Now United mentioned I was curios because I had never heard of them. Here's one of their videos:

The group has been around for 5 years and while they haven't done anything on the US music charts they tour a lot in the UK, Asia and South America. Besides overusing auto tune on every vocal, they do have the catchy songs and seem to be based in LA. They appeal to a teen market and they pump out tons of videos.

I smiled when I saw what Pepsi was doing with Now United because my mentor in my music career was part of the same type of group called The Going Thing that was put together by Ford in the late 60s. Here's there video which was pretty revolutionary because no one did music videos until MTV came along about 15 years later.

The Going Thing only lasted a couple years. Originally, Richard and Karen Carpenter of the Carpenters were in the group but were offered their own record deal on the A&M label. The Carpenters were let out of their Going Thing contract before the Going Things album was released. My mentor, John Bahler, is playing the bass on the left side and his brother, Tom,  is the one in glasses sitting down front. Both of them went on the have a lot of success, Both of them worked with the Jackson Five arranging vocals and worked with Michael Jackson. Tom wrote "She's out of my life" off of Michael's Off the Wall album. He also sang and arranged the vocals for Billy Joel's Uptown Girl album. John produced vocals for Barbra Streisand and sang on tons movies and TV shows along with national jingles.

Movie Magic

The book mentioned movies and the statistic that over half of the money made from the Marvel movies came from overseas. Well, hate to break it to them but half of the money on all films comes from over seas. Ever wonder why Tom Cruise and other big stars make the kind of money they make. It isn't because they are always the best actors for their roles.

The movie business especially today is expense. Movies like the Marvel movies and Mission Impossible movies cost upward to $250 million to make. That's a lot of money to invest on something that needs to make most of its money within a month of its release. So the way the business works is that studios put together a package that is a title, script, a star and the movie poster that is fabricated before a frame of the movie is shot and tal=ke it overseas to a film market like Canne in France. They presell the movie based on the package. The most important element is the star. So if you have someone like Tom Cruise the various buyers from territories around the world can calculate how much they made on the last few Tom Cruise movies and then they bid to tie up the rights in their market. For Marvel Movie and Mission Impossible the film studio can raise the entire cost of production upfront. Then US box office becomes the profit once other costs are paid. The general rule of thumb is that you double the production cost to set your recoupment figure with advertising and other costs. A $250 million film needs to gross over $500 million to make a profit. Since Marvel Films and Tom Cruise movies tend to make a billion... it's good bet. 

Streaming Services 

The entertainment business has been bullish on streaming and has invested a crazy amount into services like Disney Plus. What they are finding though is that maintaining that streaming income is more challenging. More and more consumers are cutting back on how many services they have and Disney Plus, while profitable, is not growing as fast as expected. Once people burned through the initial content during Covid, Disney hasn't been earning what they had hoped especially when factoring in losses on ESPN.  Without theater box office revenue bolstering the release of film because of home theaters and streaming, costs are eating up revenue. The success of shows like Game of Thrones was incredible for HBO but with each episode costing upwards of  10 million dollars, it takes a lot of subscribers to pay those bills.