Developing a marketing plan requires an assessment of the effectiveness of previous marketing activities as well as the prioritization of potential initiatives under consideration.
Implementation support involves road mapping of various initiatives, developing specific marketing strategies and tactics and measuring and optimizing activities.
Precisely defining a brand’s positioning is a critical exercise for developing marketing strategy.
What is the frame of reference that is being used in addressing their need?
What is your brand’s differentiation?
What are the reasons to believe?
What benefits are you providing that address both rational and emotional needs?
Establishing the opportunities to strengthen a brand’s positioning typically requires facilitating sessions with key stakeholders as well as customers, prospects and competitive customers.
This insight provides a valuable foundation for effective marketing implementation across channels as well as growth planning.
It’s much cheaper to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Developing an impactful loyalty program can be an effective approach to driving frequency and volume of purchases. Determining the best approach for doing this and strengthening the emotional connections that customers feel towards your brand requires. Advocacy tools and approaches can also be an untapped area that can drive growth. Identifying the most effective approaches to inspire existing customers to become advocates can be a very valuable strategic exercise for growth. Understanding the profile of existing customers is also critical for effectively prospecting for new customers.
Employee Education & Engagement
Inspired employees are those who are aligned with an organization’s mission and are highly motivated by the organization’s purpose. Helping employees understand how they can address customer needs and add value to them, can make a tremendous difference to engagement.
Developing educational training modules, which integrate customer insights from video ethnographies, for example, can be a powerful and inspirational approach to gain organizational focus on the customer and alignment about the role each employee has in contributing to the organization’s vision of delivering the ultimate customer experience.
Strategic Innovation Planning & Execution Support
Strategic innovation planning is about framing the most significant opportunities for growth. It requires an understanding of key market drivers, internal capabilities and rich insight into unmet needs and opportunities.
The “Jobs to Be Done” approach to disruptive innovation is an example of the type of process that can be used to frame opportunities for growth. This was initially developed by Clayton Christensen and can serve as a useful methodology that can be integrated into facilitated strategic sessions with stakeholders and customers.
“Discovery Driven Planning” is another key tool that can be leveraged for pilot and scenario planning.
Innovating strategically based on a robust insight foundation is an iterative process with the potential to drive significant profitable growth.
