Five questions to reflect on this planning season

Annual planning season has begun in many companies, which means marketing strategies and budgets are being planned and set for 2025 from now. As a marketing leader, I understand the need to showcase innovation; however, prioritizing the New and Shiny Marketing Thing often comes at the expense of having the foundations in place because, let’s face it, it’s pragmatic and that’s just boring. How’s that going to impress anyone, right? Well, campaigns flopping or overspending due to an inefficient marketing function is unimpressive too.

After 15 years of working in marketing, these are the five recurring themes I see in both large companies and startups that impact marketing effectiveness:

1. Short-termism has marketers going after new shiny tech or trends and tactical decision-making.

2. Changing things up for the sake of ‘looking good’ internally as opposed to what’s strategically good for the brand.

3. Quick wins come at the expense of good customer experience, retention and loyalty.

4. Fragmented/bloated martech stacks with imbalanced involvement from IT.

5. Startups specifically are over-investing in performance marketing- which is a race to the bottom- and then wonder why it’s so hard to grow.

It’s time for a detox- of the mind, the martech stack, the strategies. This is why I started this newsletter. The goal is to get you out of your bubble and challenge your thinking a little bit, so you can build a leaner marketing function and serve up a great experience for your customers too.

There are a lot of factors to consider during annual planning, but as you start doing so for 2025, reflect on these 5 questions:

1. How much of your growth came from price discounts?

2. What did the pacing of your marketing spending look like and where could it have been better?

3. How memorable is your brand?

4. Is your investment towards content and storytelling on par with your industry?

5. What’s the one message you want to get across to your audience?

Answering the above questions will require a bit of research and data gathering, and now is the time to do it. It will give you a reality check on how balanced your marketing strategy is. If most of your growth is coming from discounts and is heavily reliant on performance marketing, then your marketing strategy is not accounting for long-term objectives (unless you want to be a no-name brand people only buy from for low prices, then your strategy is great).

Upcoming editions of The MKTG Detox will tackle pressing topics- like Brand Comms and Current Affairs, Brand vs Performance marketing, AI, and Black Friday- which I know will be on the mind of every marketer during this planning season.

Happy strategising,

Nagham