BSC & BRAND DEVELOPMENT

Service Background

American companies each year spend billions of dollars in business planning and strategy. Yet, in a global survey of 4,400 senior executives, consulting firm PwC found that about 80 percent of the respondents admitted that their overall corporate strategy was not well understood, even within their own companies. And that means they’re not implemented, especially in marketing, where strategy needs to come to life if it’s going to be effective.

It’s a sad truth that business strategy often gets lost in the fog of marketing warfare as the abundance of new choices inundates marketers. Things such as websites, public relations (PR) releases, ads, e-mails, paid search, or Facebook posts take on a life of their own, demanding immediate action, and paying little heed to the grand strategy. And they all claim to be silver bullets.

Service OBJECTIVE

Service designed to give a practical, step-by-step program that provides a solid framework for implementing business strategies through the marketing process. It uses strategic messaging to connect business strategy and marketing tactics, giving corporate executives and marketers the lens they need to sharpen their focus, clarify their objectives, and bring their goals in sight. It is about making those vital connections between business strategy and marketing tactics. Bridging those divides

Service SCOPE

This service makes sure marketing tactics aligns with business strategy and objectives by:

• Developing a plan to create strategic messaging that connects strategy to tactics and drives all your communications.

• Relating your company’s business strategies to your marketing campaigns, branding, and even your blog and social media posts.

• Providing a clear understanding of marketing principles and how they apply in the age of Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

• Providing the support to justify your existing marketing budget but ask for more.

• Providing the opportunity to be taken seriously at your companies, giving you a seat at the table.

• Providing the tools to maximize marketing investments. To stop frittering away marketing resources and put them where they will have maximum impact on your company, its products, and your career.

• Providing a lexicon marketers and agency people can use to communicate with each other and explain strategy-driven campaigns to their clients (external and internal).

• Ending destructive debates about colors, logos, graphics, tactics, marketing tools, and creative executions. In effect, an escape from the “sandbox,” the tendency to view marketing and creative as a place to play

Service APPROACH

The services involves 9 steps:

1. Positioning

2. Business Objectives

3. The Market

4. The Buyer

5. The Story

6. The Content

7. Media and Integration

8. Developing Campaigns

Step 1 – Strategy and Positioning

TASK 0: Initiate Strategy Change Management activities

TASK 1: Strategy Conceptual Training

TASK 2: Strategy Process Design

a) Preparation

• Confirm understandings of the client’s existing strategy

  • Product/Technology Leadership

  • Operational Excellence

  • Customer Affinity

Step 2 – Business Objectives

TASK 2: Business Objective Design – b) Information

Conduct a working session to identify information to define business objective

• Product Leadership

  • Introduce new products

  • Own the technology leadership position

  • Increase sales/Gain market share

• Operational Excellence (Price/Delivery)

  • Lower costs

  • Own the low-cost position

  • Increase sales/Gain market share

• Operational Excellence (Quality)

  • Improve quality

  • Own the product quality position

  • Increase sales/Gain market share (especially among quality-conscious customers)

• Customer Affinity

  • Improve customer satisfaction score

  • Own the customization positioning

  • Improve share of wallet

• Propose key objectives

• Propose the organizational linkages and roles and responsibilities

• Identify linkages with business and marketing objectives

• Create a Competitive Landscape Pyramid

Step 3 – The Market

TASK 2: The Market – c) Defining company position into the industry landscape for effective marketing communication

• The Direct Model, retail model, with stores, brick-and-mortar or virtual, selling directly to consumers.

• The Distribution Model, products are sold through distribution systems. Cars, for instance, are sold through dealers (although selling direct is starting to emerge).

• Manufacturer’s Representatives, independent manufacturer’s representatives are another category of distribution with individual sales operations that usually don’t have warehouses and stock products

• Tiered Structures, the vast army of suppliers who service the automotive market are organized in a tiered structure, with a handful of car makers like Ford and General Motors designated as Tier One OEMs.

• It’s critical to understand how you fit into the industry landscape.

• Your customer’s place in the industry structure affects what’s important to them.

• Different benefits may be important to different types of customers.

Step 4 – The Buyer

For a lot of reasons, buying teams are growing by leaps and bounds in almost every industry. Major purchases, for instance, might involve a wide range of company functions, including Human Resources and Information Technology. But not all buyers are created equal. So it’s essential to determine what role each specific individual plays on the buying team

• Develop a clear understanding of the audience is one of the most important links between business strategy and marketing

• Growth of the Buying Team over the last few decades

• Roles have increased as well, maintenance-repair organization, environmental health, safety. Not to mention purchasing, finance, IT, and the shipping department

Step 5 – The Story

The story is an integral part of your marketing efforts, the tip of the spear, telling the world who you are. But the problem isn’t that most companies don’t have one. The problem is that they have more than one. Marketing has its story. Sales has another story. Individual reps may even have their accounts. So a company should create a strategic vision capturing what it needs to communicate. With a story that is aligned, connected, and differentiating.

• The strategic vision is the linchpin of the Brand Vision process

  • Start with the category

  • List primary advantages from client laundry list

  • Convert the advantages to benefits

  • Connect with the audience

  • Make it as differentiating as possible

Step 6 – The Content

Content is a major part of the business marketing process. By providing the information a prospect or customer needs, it offers evidence proving the claims a company makes in its marketing materials. This step introduces a process to gather that information and present it in the most compelling way possible. And it presents a Creative Brief summarizing strategy, audience, and messaging.

Pyramid Messaging

Based on logical, rational, deductive reasoning, pyramid messaging gives your marketing materials the structure and the information that informs them and makes them strategically relevant.

Advantages of Pyramid Messaging

Invaluable. A single source used by anyone.

Efficient. Created and approved once, to make the best use of your SME’s time.

Agile. Enables quick responses to industry topics.

Versatile. Used for anything from training and customer service to marketing automation and ABM.

Building SME Star Power

SMEs are the top minds in your company. Your franchise players. And their time is valuable

Master Messaging

Single pyramid messaging document that captures all the information needed to complete the project and states it in a consistent way. It should be reviewed and approved by all the key decision makers, especially the SMEs. It then provides approved content that copywriters and content creators will use to develop the creative materials that will become the promotional campaign.

The Creative Brief

Provides the direction for the team of writers, art directors, and content creators who will develop the campaign.

Step 7 – Media and Integration

Today’s marketers use a wide range of media to get their messages out to their audiences. But, for some, this cornucopia of choices is a curse rather than a blessing. The key, once again, is remembering that all of these media tactics are tools, not strategies. And their greatest strength is that they can be connected. That allows marketers to organize all these media choices into campaigns that advance the sale.

Media

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed that the medium was the message. He recognized that books and magazines are fundamentally different from broadcast TV or radio. And live theater was something else yet again.

Electronic media represent yet another significant milestone in human evolution. They add new dimensions to our ability to communicate. They put a wealth of information at our fingertips, making it available 24 hours a day. And they are interactive, adding a whole new realm of capabilities.

We are in a new era of connected media—communications hyperlinked to deliver a unique, customized experience to every user. An experience the user drives.

The CCC Model

• First, you need a method to disseminate new information. To get the word out about your new products or services. We call this phase of the process, “Connect.”

• Second, you need a place where interested prospects can come to find out more. We call this phase, “Convince.”

• And third, we need a way to reach out to customers who have expressed interest. We call this phase, “Convert.”

Step 8 – Developing Campaigns

Planning a marketing campaign is a lot like being an orchestra conductor. You have to harness a wide range of personalities and skills, getting the best possible performance out of each player. And getting them all to work together to harmonize their efforts, with the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. This chapter offers a seven-step guidebook for the marketing orchestra conductor, going from planning through optimization and reporting

Campaign Planning in Seven Steps

1.Plan

2.Meet

3.Map

4.Create

5.Produce and launch

6.Optimize

7.Report