Welcome to Marketing Chronicles. A newsletter where marketers come for expert industry commentary at the intersection of strategy and creativity — every Wednesday sent before daybreak. If you like what you see, join us for free.

In this edition:

• Column: Mobilizing Resources Through Objective-Setting

• Inspiration: Burger King “Real Size”

• LAST CALL: Marketing Insights — Winning with Emerging Trends

Column: Mobilizing Resources Through Objective-Setting

Every year around this time brand managers around the world stand in front of their executive leadership teams and present their plans for the following year on how they will grow their brands.

This yearly exercise is called strategic planning, and it’s done by brands big and small. It’s a way to evaluate how the past year went, which assumptions landed results, which initiatives didn’t perform, how key brand equity metrics are doing, and much more.

This enables managers to take an objective look about what’s working vs not working and adjust their strategies accordingly.

So, after reviewing the latest research, double checking segmentation and targeting priorities, and determining the performance of the existing positioning and whether it needs updating… comes the most important section of every plan: objective setting.

Marketers fear this slide because oftentimes that’s when they need to stick their necks out and say: THIS is what I think we can achieve next year based on everything I’ve just shown you.

In large multinationals, revenue and profit growth targets are often passed down from finance and the marketing leadership team in a highly collaborative process, but then it sits with the brand manager to translate those business objectives into marketing objectives.

Business Objectives vs Marketing Objectives

Every organization has business objectives.

They’re often broad and a bit vague — such as “grow market share by 5%” or “become the number 1 brand in the category” — but that’s done on purpose.

These “directional” objectives set the tone for the entire organization so that each department can evaluate how they will help drive them forward. If they’re too prescriptive, then organizations risk overlooking cross-departmental nuances.

So, as a marketer how do you turn “grow market share by 5%” into marketing objectives? The example below from Dare, an Australian brand of iced-coffee, shows beautifully how business objectives and marketing objectives interact with one another:

A marketing objective isn’t necessarily tied to a revenue or profit metric (although sometimes they can be, check out this article I wrote on crafting SMART objectives).

Marketers deal with brands. And brands are intangible things in the minds of consumers. So, each year good marketers will look at their brand tracking and see whether or not key equity signals have improved or gotten worse.

Brand equity metrics range from “brand awareness” and “preference”, to “category relevance”, “situational salience”, and “distinction”. There are more ways to measure a brand’s health, but 90% of the time the above should cover it.

Now, making a CHOICE to drive awareness instead of situational salience (i.e.: improving unaided recall instead of association between your brand and a key occasion, such as football) is a strategic choice.

Marketers can’t do everything because these things cost a lot of money to accomplish and they take time to happen.

How To Determine Your Marketing Objectives

Making the right choices around what metrics to go after come from your yearly strategic planning process.

And by taking a good hard look at your FUNNEL.

Yes, the contentious funnel.

For decades people have tried to reinvent it, kill it, rename it, but the funnel still is the best metaphor to make sense of customer acquisition: how are future customers going from unawareness to becoming a buyer.

Now, each brand will have their own particular funnel. Some might only have 3 phases, others might have 6 or more.

For example, let’s take a look at Netflix UK’s 2021 funnel:

• In the UK there are 27.8 million households.

• 81% of those households watch subscription video on demand (SVOD).

• 98% of those people who watch SVOD, watch Netflix.

• But only 62% of those people watching Netflix are actual paying subscribers, due to password sharing.

• And 59% of all Netflix subscribers (or 29% of all UK households) have scored a 9 or higher in the Net Promoter Score survey (which is a great sign that they’d recommend the service).

By looking at this, Netflix marketing managers could easily identify that it was time to crack down on password sharing in order to drive subscriptions up, and that the previous years’ strategy to drive household penetration (people who watch Netflix, subscribers or not) has reached its final destination.

And so, for 2021 Netflix’s marketing objective could sound something like:

• Increase the proportion of British households who watch Netflix and subscribe from 49% to 60% by December of 2021.

You see, this exercise of reevaluating your plans isn’t about shooting down “bad” plans. Instead, it’s about making strategic choices on what to focus next to continue to drive revenue and profitability growth.

Objectives Are About Making Choices

One of consumer packaged goods’ GOATs, AG Lafley, ex- P&G CEO and Chairman, once laid out 6 strategy traps to avoid in his book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works:

1. The Do-It-All Strategy: where you don’t make choices

2. The Don Quixote Strategy: where you try to do something entirely impossible

3. The Waterloo Strategy: where you try to fight the battle in 4-5 different fronts, and you’re probably going to lose at all of them

4. The Something-For-Everyone Strategy: where you try to please everyone in the organization, effectively replacing choicefulness

5. The Dreams-That-Never-Come-True Strategy: where you have 10-15 objectives that will never happen because you have too many of them

6. The Program-Of-The-Month Strategy: where your strategy is just following trends

Strategy is about making choices. And a strategy without clear objectives isn’t a strategy at all — it’s hopes and dreams.

Hoping to grow isn’t a very effective way to win in the market. You must dig deep and commit to what you’re going to go do.

Because plans only work if you know what you’re planning for.

Inspiration: Burger King “Real Size”

It’s no secret by now that Burger King is one of the top advertisers in the world.

Their ability to find new and interesting ways to express their brand is something that very few other companies can boast about.

In their latest round of kick-ass OOH executions, BK launched billboards across Mexico that displayed their product’s ACTUAL size.

Not billboard-sized.

Actual burger-sized.

This was a clever way to spotlight how large their burgers are by going against everything we’re taught in OOH advertising (that product shots should be huge).

👑

LAST CALL: Marketing Insights — Winning with Emerging Trends

• May 30, 2024 @ 12pm - 1pm MST

• Virtual via Zoom

• Register for FREE HERE

In an ever-changing world… Marketing is changing with it. So how can you tell the difference between mirages and milestones on the path to success?

Join Pedro Porto Alegre (me!), WJ Agency’s Director of Strategy, for an equal parts fun and insightful hour-long discussion about where marketing might be headed.

Topics I’ll cover:

• Key marketing trends that are shaping how brands might win now and in the immediate future

• How to avoid the trap of short-termism

• The importance of creating connections where customers are most present

• The revolutionary impact of artificial intelligence on campaigns

• The growing influence of virtual worlds in gaming

• How a strong brand identity can serve as a powerful differentiator in a crowded market

• And more

REGISTER FOR FREE HERE WHILE SPOTS ARE STILL AVAILABLE.

• Date: Thursday, May 30, 2024

• Location: Virtual via Zoom

• Time: 12:00 PM MST – 1:00 PM MST

• Cost: Free

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 🍻 Come by the WJ office for a brew

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • How To Be Clear With Your Brand Positioning

  • Why Targeting Still Has A Role To Play In Marketing Plans

  • Market Segmentation Explained

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.