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Continuing some of the rough thoughts begun here in part 1 on how marketing planning will need to change given the fact that marketing itself has changed.
Marketing is a dialogue. It’s a relationship. It’s a listening process.
You say something, the market responds. You adjust, the market responds.
You refine and iterate until you have a story that resonates, which people can tell their friends, and which give them reason to call you.
Thing is, the dialogue used to move VERY slowly.
You’d say something (say via a billboard or a direct mail campaign) and it could take weeks or months to get the reaction.
Organizing and analyzing a focus group itself would take weeks.
So, in a given year, you could only plan a few things to execute.
Today, of course, the feedback loop is instantaneous.
Now that Bing and Google have integrated Twitter into their search results, you can get real-time results of a campaign.
What’s more, you want a focus group? It’s already out there.
You know that.
So…your opportunity to iterate comes sooner.
May as well take it.
Instead of saying once (or maybe twice a year) “here are the campaigns we will run for the next 6 or 12 months,” Say instead,
“We are going to create a story about this product/service that people will want to tell their friends.
We will measure the success of the story by how often people talk about it (pick your metric here)…and if they don’t talk about it at RATE X, well then, we will try a different way to tell the story.
And we will do this every 3 weeks until we get it right. Because we can.”
This is where you design for innovation. The feedback loops enable Rapid Marketing Development. This is how you exploit opportunities that arise…which you didn’t foresee in your planning process.
Next time, I’ll wrap this up….for now :-)
Updated: here’s the final part.
