Fixing Tactical Planning

Every year, brand teams invest immense time and money in tactical planning. And every year, they generate tons of interesting, innovative ideas. The problem is, only a vanishingly small percentage of those ideas ever get executed. This tends to breed cynicism in the team: what’s the point of all this thinking if we generally end up executing the same type of ideas, and the tactics we are passionate about end up on the cutting room floor?

There is a better way, one that leads to thoughtful experimentation instead of pie-in-the-sky, un-executable ideas. It starts with acknowledging that there is both room to improve on the status quo, and good reason why the status quo exists in the first place. Your annual tactical planning exercise should both help you improve your existing approaches and find opportunities to take some calculated risks.

The first step is a commitment to the 70/20/10 rule. This is the idea that a good tactical plan should devote 70% of its budget to optimizing tried-and-true ideas, 20% to experimenting within established channels or approaches, and 10% to bold ideas that depart from the status quo. This should be inclusive of your media budget: if you spend $5 million a year, put $500,000 into a high-risk, high-reward opportunity.

Once you’ve made that commitment, you should review your last year’s spend and commit to continuing the 70% of tactics that performed the best from the year before. While you might make tweaks to messaging or relative channel spend, those tactics should not be the focus of your tactical planning exercise. That leaves you to brainstorm around the 30% of your budget that will be devoted to new ideas.

Now you’re ready to brainstorm, but remember that 2/3rds of your ideas should work within established channels. You might, for example, spend some time brainstorming around better ways to create engagement in the digital channels you already know your customers use. You might also think about your convention presence or your field force approach, and develop ideas that would change how you utilize these resources.

Next, it’s time for your crazy, audacious ideas. Because you’ve already solved for 90% of your marketing plan, you’re now looking for high upside ideas that could really advance your brand if they work. Often, participants focus on the latest and greatest technology, and come up with a trendy idea to leverage it. (Expect to see a lot of ideas that leverage Clubhouse or Signal in the next 12 months.) To ensure your ideas are relevant and not just chasing buzz, ground your stretch ideas in insights about how customers behave and learn. How do they answer tough questions? Where do they go to interact with their peers? Whose opinion or advice to they rely on? What would delight them?

If your understanding of your customer is good, even the most unconventional idea has a chance of driving behavior change. And if it does, next year it will be in the 70% of ideas that you pull forward, and you can push your marketing even farther.