° Tips

A few ground rules to start improving your marketing practice

• Run your marketing function as a business and the marketing budget as an P/L statement.
• Derive all marketing objectives from the business objectives, illustrate how they link, and then translate into marketing tactics.
• Pay attention to both maneuvers and means. Maneuvers = what we need to do in the market. Means = what we need to do internally to execute the maneuvers.
• Drive a business mind-set in your teams and expect insight to all key business functions - supply chain, sales, IT, customer service, engineering/design etc.
• Start with process and briefings. You can get a long way by establishing a marketing process that links directly with the corporate planning process, go-to-market process and other core business processes, and by improving the briefings to internal and external partners such as product design, market communication etc.
• Establish systematic market visits to re-sellers, suppliers, customers, competitors - and document learnings.
• Use simple planning tools that you and your teams can use to plan long-term as well as activate on a daily basis for everyday direction. Strategy maps are often a good tool for this.