In my 30-year FMCG marketing and sales career, I must have been an integral part of the brand planning process for 20 cycles and led the whole process at least half a dozen times. What I have learned is that there is not a perfect process. What I have also learned is that there is a set of best practices that, if followed, deliver more effective marketing strategies and better commercial execution. Follow these 6 x tips to optimise your brand planning process.
This article is written with a CMO or Chief Commercial Officer in mind, but I would hope that it is applicable to anyone working within a commercial function. The article assumes the business strategy is already in place and, therefore, concentrates on the annual process that unites the commercial function behind aligned brand and customer plans.
The distinction between a strategy and a plan is laid out in a previous blog titled ‘How to build a brand strategy and not just a brand plan.
Here are my 6 tips to optimise the brand planning process
No.1 Start with Ambition
The strategy is there to direct you, but to secure the investment levels required for your brand(s) to grow, you need to be ambitious with your targets and metrics. To have that ambition, you need the right mindset if you are to optimise the brand planning process.
A quick story
On a freezing cold winter’s day in Toronto, my leadership team came together to kick off what we called Commercial Planning (a combination of Brand Planning Process and Sales Planning). After 3 hours of discussing what our ambition for the following year could be, it became apparent that the team were in ‘defend’ mode. We had a significant market share, and the feeling emerging from the room was that to hold our position would be a good result. This was justified by the fact the market was flat, at best, and there were economic headwinds. Time out!
What happened next was referred to fondly in future years as the ‘Swiss Chalet moment’. This moment proved to be a turning point for us as a leadership group. The team agreed to stay late and have a working dinner. As the team tucked into their chicken & chips, I took two flip charts and wrote DEFEND on one and GROW on the other and asked people to express how they would feel at the end of the year if we had managed to hold our position and how they would feel if we achieved growth?
There is a video featuring Carol Dweck at Google (link below). She talks about how those with a growth mindset “focus on the challenge instead of the outcome, they believe that personal development and stretching themselves beyond their limits is more important than the appearance of success.” She goes on to say that these people want to “feel they’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues.”
The Growth Mindset | Carol Dweck | Talks at Google
It was clear from the team’s engagement that they had ambition and would get greater satisfaction from pushing for growth; it was just at this point they couldn’t see how they were going to get there and didn’t want to let the business down by signing up for numbers they might not be able to achieve.
The critical point here is that they were galvanised by the same ambition and were willing to trust each other so that by the end of the Commercial Planning process, the actions would be capable of delivering growth. Removing all defensive behaviours is paramount to having any chance of building a compelling plan.
No.2. For the brand planning process, you need the right data, not lots of data.
Many large organisations are awash with data. They have so much they are no longer sure which numbers are important. Many small organisations have no data. As always, in these polar opposite situations, the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle.
Stripping back your data requirements and aligning them to your desired business outcomes and to the marketing concepts that are proven to drive brand growth is a great place to start. For example, thought leaders in marketing and business communities agree that brands grow by building Mental and Physical availability*. Yes, there are many supporting concepts that contribute to optimal marketing effectiveness and commercial execution, but these umbrella concepts are a great place from which to build your data sets.
* Mental Availability definition;
“the propensity to be thought of in buying situations now and in the future.”
Romaniuk 2023.
Physical Availability definition;
“buyers can buy the brand in a variant, quantity and price that matches their purchasing needs.”
Sharp 2023
It is possible to get information on your category, the category buyers, your competitors and your brand just by completing a Mental Availability assessment. You can do this by following the steps outlined in the book ‘Better Brand Health’ by Jenni Romaniuk, or indeed, contact SmilingCFO, and we can do it for you.
This cost-effective approach will tell you how likely your brand is to be thought of in buying situations. It will tell you the most important memory retrieval cues (aka Category Entry Points) for the category in which your brand operates. You will understand the potential of the brand and be able to help sales colleagues build customer rationales that widen the brand’s physical availability.
The data you use must ultimately inform the KPIs that are incorporated into business targets. To that end, make sure all your key stakeholders understand the data, where it is sourced and why it is used. Then, ensure the metrics selected matter to the business and are not confused by marketing jargon.
I would recommend training the wider team on the data using ‘live’ numbers. As you take them through the methodology and the findings, encourage them to form growth hypotheses using the data in the context of their market, brand and business knowledge.
Once you have a set of hypotheses, you can assign a smaller group to dive deeper into the data to validate or disprove them.
Not only does this aid learning, but it also helps you take a leap forward in the planning process, and your objectives will be smarter as a result.
The link below gives you more detail on how to move from the data gathered as a result of a Mental Availability assessment to developing hypotheses for growth.
Why a Mental Availability Assessment is a critical part of market orientation
No.3 Sacrifice most of what you want to do.
Sacrifice is a ‘credo of a challenger brand’ introduced by Adam Morgan in the book ‘Eat the Big Fish’, but I have found it to be equally applicable for any size brand and/or portfolio. Why? Because any brand needs to be able to maximise its budget to reach as many category buyers as possible. It is critical that you are mindful of this in the brand planning process.
The idea behind ‘sacrifice’ is that “what it chooses not to do defines who and what (a brand) really is.” There is a nice story about that in the book. It might be a Picasso myth, but it is powerful nonetheless.
“A visitor to his studio saw a huge block of stone sitting in the middle of the studio and asked the master what it was to be. A lion came the reply. And how will you make a lion out of this unhewn stone block? It’s easy, said Picasso. I simply get a chisel and chip away anything that doesn’t look like a lion.”
If you work in an organisation with a wide portfolio, it is critical that every brand leader understands the role of their brand within the portfolio strategy. You then need regular check-ins during brand planning development so each leader has visibility of the other’s emerging plan. This is the only way you will avoid an aggregated plan that requires unrealistic levels of new distribution and investment. This calls for a leadership group with both an enterprise mindset as well as a growth mindset.
If you work on a challenger brand, and work up the brand planning process, then you may be trying to do a lot with a little. This is the opportunity to switch to doing a little with a little. Our article on ‘How Challenger Brands Can Win’ offers some useful tips on prioritisation.
Brand Strategy: How Challenger Brands Can Win – SmilingCFO
No.4 ‘The Long & The Short’ can apply to more than marketing effectiveness.
For those marketers reading this article, and knee-deep in the brand planning process, you will be familiar with Binet & Field and their seminal publication ‘The Long & the Short’, which navigates us through the benefits of balancing long-term brand building and short-term sales activation. I have included a link to a recent interview where Les and Peter talk about the key concepts 10 years on.
As a quick reminder, the broad guidance is that to maximise effectiveness, a brand should invest 60% in equity building and 40% in sales activation. There is context to be considered here, and in their publication ‘Marketing Effectiveness in Context’, they highlight when and how these percentages might vary; for example, a new brand is more likely to be effective by spending 35% on the ‘Long’ and 65% on the ‘Short’.
I think this concept can be stretched to navigate the Commercial Planning process. In my last organisation, we were transitioning from being a Brewing company to a Beverage company. Innovation became a primary focus, and we had to delicately manage the introduction of new brands whilst ensuring our core brands didn’t go backwards. Balancing the long-term business direction (3+ years out) with the short-term commercial targets (3+ months out) was critical.
Dealing with dilemmas in the Brand Planning Process
In the same way, as marketers can be seduced by the short-term delivery of performance marketing compared with the harder-to-measure long-term brand-building interventions, the same dilemmas face the wider commercial team and organisation. In our case, it would have been easier in the short term to run another year of the ‘focus on the core’ Plan. After all, we knew that all our stakeholders could execute that playbook efficiently, but all the trend and insight data pointed to the fact that for us to be successful over the long term, we had to take a more ambitious, but riskier path.
It is at these moments of uncertainty, when faced with a fork in the road that you are rewarded for the time invested in building a growth mindset with the team. Remember that wonderful quote from Carol Dweck; “(teams with a growth mindset want to) feel they’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues.”
Motivated by the possibility of positive change, we set about building a rigorous plan to maximise the innovation opportunities whilst minimising the risk of impacting the rest of the portfolio. A key part of the new plan was to get our budgets right, which moves me on to ‘tip 5’.
No.5 Avoid the ‘big bang’ approach.
All too often, I see big brand launches that swallow the majority of the budget in one go. Everyone enjoys the initial spike in performance, but as consumers’ memories decay, the brand rate of sale starts to slide, the customer becomes restless, the sales teams start to question the potential of the new brand, and the supply chain wants to know when the volume that was forecast will leave the warehouse.
To avoid this scenario, the general guidance is to take your budget and divide it by 12 months or 52 weeks in order to stretch what you can afford across the year so you are reaching as many buyers of the category as possible whilst staying fresh in the memory of these buyers.
No.6 Building the whole Plan bottom up rarely leads to the best plan.
In general terms, I would say that the more collaborative and inclusive the commercial & brand planning process is, the better.
But in 3 key areas, I advocate a top-down approach.
i) Brand Budgets
Ensure you have some principles for investment, e.g. media share of voice ahead of your share of the market.
Provide your brand leaders with a framework within which to operate.
Task them to propose and align on how the overall budget is allocated by brand. Include the Sales leaders on the promotional elements of the budgeting process.
Be ready to step in to facilitate final alignment.
Only at this point would I recommend cascading budgets to the wider brand teams.
ii) Activation Calendar
If you run a portfolio, ensure you have a portfolio priority grid that provides guidance. Then, follow a similar process to the one outlined for brand budgets.
iii) Sales Targets
It won’t be possible to focus on every territory, every channel and every customer.
Set targets for the sales teams based on the level of support that has been allocated in the budgeting process. The sales individual will be grateful that they don’t spend hours building a bottom-up plan and a business case for investment that never had any chance of being approved.
The intent here is to help the teams by giving them a directional framework. Starting everything bottom rarely works; it is time-consuming and often frustrates those doing the building because they are not the decision maker. If you are truly empowering the team and are willing to accept their output as final, then running a bottom-up process might be appropriate, but it is likely to be a slow and potentially tense approach.
In conclusion: Brand Planning Process
This article is not intended to walk you through every step of a Brand Planning process but instead to enhance the process you already have by sharing my experiences and directing you to articles, books and videos that I think will help.
My hope is that by integrating these 6 tips, your team and wider stakeholders are energised by the annual planning process and not frustrated by it. That means them being excited by the ambition and clear on the actions and metrics that will drive performance.
If you have any questions or have a tip that you think would benefit others, please DM me through LinkedIn or send us a WhatsApp. I will then update the article and credit you accordingly.
Connect with Martin on LinkedIn
Read Martin’s blog on why a Mental Availability Assessment is a critical part of being Market Orientated, or go to our video on YouTube to watch
Martin has led Sales and marketing teams in multiple countries. From £1bn + turnovers, with large commercial teams, to leading ‘emerging growth divisions’ alongside founders and entrepreneurs, he has a track record of building brands and developing people.
Influenced by many marketing thought leaders, including the Ehrenberg Bass Institute, Phil Barden (Decoded), and Binet & Field, to name just a few, he attributes his career highlights to combining these principles with his ability to align organisations behind the most important objectives and executing as one team.
As a Vice President who worked in Martin’s leadership team said, “He has the ability to positively impact a company’s journey and the journey of the individuals within the company”.
