2025 Plans: Small ambitions won’t help you slay the dragons

How to move the marketing needle & accelerate an inspiring future

Sound strategy is the province of brand and category leaders who influence culture and transform lives – bending the market in their direction while doing it. This is all too rare. Here we uncover the secrets of sound strategy and the path to harnessing its power.

In more than a few CPG or retail categories, we encounter brands and businesses that are marginally differentiated from competitors and year-to-year only add a tweak here or there to a marketing platform that follows a well-worn, uninspiring path.?

The typical recycled plan elements include:

• New product launches that add some refreshed story to the existing portfolio pipeline
• New retail or omni channel distribution secured and supporting plans developed to help push velocity
• Adjustments to brand messaging around a restyled outreach campaign
• A goal to increase sales by x% and stay ahead of the forecasted category growth trajectory

Sound strategy not on the menu

All fine, except, sound strategy rarely if ever sits underneath an extension of the status quo. What masquerades as strategy is all too often a middle ground tactical endeavor that will inevitably achieve base hits rather than an inspiring leap towards a desirable ‘grand slam’ business performance.

The mysterious predictor of marketing outcomes is served up in the goals set for the coming year. Not all goals are created equal. Meaning, quite often we see brands settling on tactical goals. On the flip side are more challenging goals (which we can design) that demand and provoke sound strategy.

So, what’s the difference?

A tactical goal –

• You’re aiming to increase sales by x%
• You aren’t substantially altering the pathway or conversation
• You may increase spending, adjust the media mix, modify the story
• Importantly, you know what to do next and so does your competition

A strategic goal –

• You want to transform the category and change consumer behavior
• You don’t immediately know how to get there or what comes next
• You can’t do the same thing again, only more of it
• You must change direction, behaviors, tools and do something different

Tactical goals can’t put you on a path to deploying sound strategy. If the goal is narrowly defined, strategy simply isn’t required and won’t manifest. This is the territory occupied by non-strategic brands and businesses. When ambitions are (much) bigger, you’ll need a unique and imaginative plan to tackle it – thus a strategy.

Sound strategy is instantly recognizable because:

1. It doesn’t pose questions, it answers them
2. It immediately causes you to stretch beyond the comfort zone
3. It will work to build tangible differentiation and separation with everyone else on shelf
4. If there’s a tinge of discomfort because you’re taking a risk, then you know you’re onto something
5. Our brand is the only X that does Y

The curious relationship between higher purpose and larger ambitions

Brands that have a well-defined “why” and higher purpose that imbues the entire business proposition with deeper meaning, often carries a natural predisposition for bigger, more transformative goals. When you start with inspirational aims that inform the entire organization, the blueprint you create for band behavior leads to ambitious thinking.

That said, too often we find that brand higher purpose, mission and values are under-nourished. In its place are marketing programs often focused on feature and benefit selling (driven by tactical goals). For most businesses this is a recipe for narrow brand distinctions, static share growth performance and organizational cautiousness.

Feed the cow or slay the dragon?

The world is changing more rapidly these days:

• Businesses de-stabilize
• New categories emerge
• Consumer interests rapidly shift
• Culture moves in new directions
• What was fashionable quickly becomes passe
• New technologies disrupt

We believe that in reality the pursuit of tactical goal and absence of sound strategy is a riskier path than the move to cast for a much more ambitious prize.

Why?

Because change is the runaway train, and the status quo just isn’t as stable as it may appear.

Besides, life is short and marketing leaders aspire to be part of transforming a brand or category rather than simply running the treadmill while the wildfires of change edge ever closer.

Slaying the business dragon is ultimately more satisfying than simply feeding another bale of familiar programming hay to the current category cow.

Key questions to ask on this journey

• Where do we have a point of view as a brand and how do we bring that to life?
• How can we look past competitors and push the edges of differentiation towards forming a new category we own?
• How can we better inspire our customers and improve their lives?
• What are we on the planet to accomplish beyond making and selling products/services?

An outside voice can help you raise the bar

A third-party perspective can bring fresh ideas, thinking and counsel on strategies that help recast your brand’s growth trajectory – while providing a roadmap to better decisions and improved, more effective deployment of your marketing assets.

If this discussion on sound strategy and bigger goals inspires you to think differently about your marketing plans, use the link below to start a conversation with us about raising the bar of your business ambitions.

Looking for more food for thought??Subscribe to the Emerging Trends Report . Bob Wheatley ?is the CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency. Traditional brand marketing often sidesteps more human qualities that can help consumers form an emotional bond.?Yet brands yearn for authentic engagement, trust and a lasting relationship with their customers. Emergent helps brands erase ineffective self-promotion and replace it with clarity, honesty and deeper meaning in their customer relationships and communication. For more information, contact?[email protected] ?and follow on X?@BobWheatley .

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