Marketing without a clear strategy behind it is essentially just self-promotion. While promoting your business, products or services is an important part of marketing, doing so without a strategic framework will limit your success.
Self-promotion is about talking about yourself and your products or services. It’s about trying to convince people to buy from you. But strategy is about understanding your target audience, identifying their needs, and developing a plan to reach them.
Without a strategy, your marketing will be ineffective. You’ll be throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping that something sticks. You’ll be wasting time and money on marketing activities that don’t work.
Where organizations have displayed a lack of strategy and the consequences
- Walmart in Japan: Walmart is one of the largest and most successful retailers in the world. But when they tried to expand into Japan, they failed miserably. One of the main reasons for their failure was a lack of strategy. Walmart didn’t understand the Japanese market or the needs of Japanese consumers. They tried to sell the same products and services that they sold in the US, without making any adjustments for the Japanese market. As a result, Japanese consumers were not interested in what Walmart had to offer.
- New Coke: In 1985, Coca-Cola decided to change the formula of its flagship product, Coca-Cola. They introduced a new product called New Coke, which replaced the original Coca-Cola formula. However, New Coke was a disaster. Consumers hated it. Coca-Cola was forced to bring back the original Coca-Cola formula a few months later.
What went wrong? Coca-Cola had a lack of strategy. They didn’t do their research to find out what consumers wanted. They assumed that consumers would love the new formula. As a result, they made a decision that cost them billions of dollars in lost sales.
- Fyre Festival: Fyre Festival was a music festival that was supposed to take place in the Bahamas in 2017. The festival was promoted as a luxurious event, with tickets costing thousands of dollars. But, when the festival attendees arrived, they were met with a disaster. The festival grounds were a mess, there was not enough food or water, and the music performances were canceled.
The Fyre Festival was a complete failure. One of the main reasons for its failure was a lack of strategy. The festival organizers were more focused on self-promotion than on actually putting on a successful event. They made promises that they couldn’t keep, and they didn’t have a plan in place for handling unexpected problems.
Key reasons why marketing requires an intentional strategy
Focus – A strong marketing strategy keeps your efforts focused on your core target audience. Without this focus, your messaging can seem disjointed and you may fail to resonate with your ideal customers. Strategic focus helps you allocate your marketing resources efficiently.
Messaging – An effective strategy guides your messaging so that all of your content, ads, and communications align around consistent themes and positioning. This consistency strengthens your brand identity. Without it, your messaging may come across as fragmented or confusing.
Results – A marketing strategy sets tangible goals and benchmarks for success. These could include metrics like new customer acquisition, sales targets, or market share. Tracking performance towards these goals allows you to gauge the ROI of your marketing activities. No strategy means you lack a way to measure impact.
Innovation – Setting a strategy requires analyzing the market, your competitors, and customer needs. These insights open up new opportunities for the innovation of products, services, and customer experiences. A “shoot from the hip” approach to marketing may neglect these opportunities.
Sustainability – Building a thoughtful marketing strategy is like constructing a framework that can support ongoing activities. The discipline of strategic planning helps sustain marketing efforts over the long-term even as competitive conditions evolve.
Essentially, having a well-defined marketing strategy acts like a compass to provide direction. It brings focus to your marketing so that all activities work cohesively towards achieving your most important business goals. While promoting your brand is necessary, doing so randomly without strategy behind it is inherently limited. A strategic approach to marketing builds meaning, consistency and measurable impact.
With strategy, marketing drives growth; without it, marketing is just promotion.
The views expressed herein are personal and do not reflect the views of any of my clients, partners or employers.
Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash