Why is it that teams invest time developing brand plans, only for that plan which they’ve labored over, to spend the rest of the year sitting untouched on someone’s laptop?
One of the reasons a plan can be prematurely irrelevant is that underlaying planning assumptions – the ‘foundations’ – are constructed on dodgy ground.
When I run a brand planning facilitation for clients, early on we’ll have a working session to review “where are we now” for the business and its brand/s.
This step helps the team form an honest and shared view of their landscape. It’s also important for getting a handle on the biggest opportunities or problems which the brand needs to face into.
But here’s the thing.
Marketers are often optimists, accomplished at finding and presenting the positives. One the one hand this means they can have an uplifting and empowering effect on others – the sort of people that ask, “how can we” rather “just not possible”.
But on the other hand, it means that for some marketers drawing together an objective situation analysis can be a weakness or blind spot.
Often, I will get sight of a – often lengthy – draft analysis ahead of a workshop. From time to time, you may also see PowerPoint charts crammed with bullet points, presented in tiny fonts 😉
If the business or brand are new to me, it’s on me to get up to speed quickly to be useful to the client.
So, one of the challenges is how do we find the most helpful evidence within a potentially unwieldy analysis.
To help, I’ve developed a hack.
Get three different colored highlighters.
As you read through the charts/deck, mark each insight based on whether it is a…
… FACT(based on evidence, from a reliable source)
… HYPOTHESIS (supposition based on logic, but not confirmed)
… OPINION (an assertion not obviously backed by facts)
To be clear, none of these classifications is inherently bad.
For example, the opinions of a retail buyer or an experienced co-worker may be incredibly insightful. And as a marketer you often work with incomplete information and make assumptions as a precursor to action. You can’t afford to get paralyzed by analysis.
But, if as marketing leaders we don’t push for an evidence-based situation analysis, we risk building shaky foundations for the rest of the planning exercise.
Try it for yourself.
The next time your brand team compiles a situation analysis or presents assumptions behind a business case, get out your highlighter pens!
You may be pleasantly surprised.
First you can quickly see where the team has solid evidence and where there are gaps.
Second, you might identify assumptions or statements which you want to ask the team to explain.
Third, the ratio of highlighted colours tells you how much your team relies on different types of input for their analysis.
