Business and Brand: The Scourge of Unmarketability
“Block your calendar for strategic planning” is a phrase no one wants to hear.
“Block your calendar for brand planning” is a phrase that is rarely said, but should be said at the same time as the aforementioned phrase.
While each are separate disciplines, they intertwine in important and symbiotic ways. Take one, either one, away from the other, and you’ve turned planning into gambling and the smart money is on failure.
RE-THINKING STRATEGIC PLANNING
It’s not uncommon for strategic planning to be very internally focused, meaning, SWOT and formalized complaining. That is OK. It is often needed, especially when the layers of an organization conspire to prevent senior management from knowing what’s really going on. It happens.
Becoming aware and fixing the issues is good. Yet, fixing the issues is table stakes when running an even mildly successful business.
The problem here is that strategic business planning often addresses current states that have little to do with future success.
Market conditions, sector and social trends, and the needs and motivations with whom you are communicating sometimes make the planning directives from a traditional session “unmarketable.”
BOOM. Buried the lead: “Unmarketability.”
Unmarketable could mean a host of issues:
Too many initiatives to communicate at the same time
Messaging that is not prioritized or aligned with decision journeys
Messages with no value propositions to either internal or external audiences
Strategic initiatives that cannot be successful because realistic budgets of money and/or time were not considered
Strategic planning, the root canal of leadership, is hard enough. But if you’re using strategic planning in the traditional sense – by talking about “who you are” instead of “who you aspire to be” – and you don’t include brand planning, insult to injury will be your future when it doesn’t work.
If you Google, chat or otherwise search, you’ll find articles that talk about the 60 to 90 percent failure rate associated with strategic planning. If you look at why planning fails, most articles say “communication within an organization.”
That would be employees.
The failure, at its core, is a failure in communicating brand behavior. Brands don’t just live in media, they live in hallways. Brands live and are executed in the group-think of employees. And most people do not think about strategic constructs. They do, however, subconsciously understand visual cues.
They also can smell authenticity. How’s your infamous “why” being communicated?
Internal brand campaigns are more than propaganda; done well, they get you where you want to go.
Moral of the story: Don’t forget the tires when you're building your new car.