Sticking to Marketing Strategies

Sticking to a marketing strategy and being consistent with it is a difficult work, since you are keep on being tempted to try new stuffs(or follow the fads rather), change your styles, fix your designs and typographies, change your slogan, etc. These 'pulls' to change are the nature of marketing and one of the biggest traps a marketer may come across.

Unfortunately, our company isn't any exception either. After launching Lineage II official services in South Korea, our marketing plans and actions had no visible or clear direction, but all just 'trials' of very different things. Doing co-marketing with Coca-cola and Pringles, game-preview events, customer gathering sessions, etc. All these things had one problem. It had no one consistent marketing concept, or a marketing map. According to the author of the book 'Built to Last' - Jim Collins -, companies that last had 'tried lots of things and keep what worked', but this does not necessarily mean that you may change your marketing plan often fundamentally.

A good example of what a consistent marketing is HP. Hewlett-Packard has done some excellent marketing activities lately, consistenly getting that HP + everthing message across the world. Now, I haven't really been keeping up with the stocks nor the financial statements of HP, but I can imagine that if the product/service qualities of HP are satisfactory enough, the marketing must be doing well to support that.

The very core of this case is where the marketing map lies. After setting up a well-focused marketing concept, drawing up a detailed map of which road and how the marketing is going to run all the way through. But this is a tough, a very speculative task and you may keep on getting tempted to change your marketing message and fundamentals, just as an article from businesspundit.com mentions,

I don't know if it is a lack of confidence in the strategy or just fear when I don't see immediate results.

This is quite true, and this is why you need more than a marketing concept(having without one is way more easy to make yourself feel uncertain), a marketing plan based on intuition. You should set up a step-by-step marketing strategy map and place a structured measurement system along each step to see how you perform with your strategy. Such method can be derived from time-managment tools as Project Network Diagrams & CPM(Critical Path Method).

But you don't need to setup a microscopic-detailed marketing map, because as with marketing itself, it tends to change as the time goes. It would be a good idea to setup milestones and key-paths to your marketing objectives to see how nicely you are going towards that. The point here is how you 'measure' it. Like in investment, it is better to set a baseline on which you decide whether you must go or stop your actions.

Keep the consistency where it should be.


- dotty.