Tips to improve your marketing practice

• Run your marketing function as a business and the marketing budget as an P/L statement. Pay equal attention to marketing strategy and marketing operations.
• 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 team(s) and expect insight to all key business functions – supply chain, sales, customer service, IT, 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, communication, agencies etc.
• Establish regular, structured market visits to local offices, stores, suppliers, customers, and competitor touch points. Document and share 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.

Check out Cases for stories on marketing performance.

Or do a speed-audit of your company’s marketing practice with the Switchmodel® test below.

Conduct your own
speed-audit

Are you on the path to high-performance in marketing? Download the Switchmodel test as PDF and fill it in for your company, using the questions in the model as a guide.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have questions/comments or would like a walk-through of the Switchmodel test.