Is Planning Still Worth it?

With So Many Variables to consider in today’s Consumer marketplace, is it worth spending valuable time Planning?

At Ember, we take annual and seasonal planning seriously. We help our clients focus on Q4 during August and annual planning during September/October. This helps eliminate distraction and the tendency for teams to overreact to unforeseen variables rather than stay the course with a sound plan in place. Of course, we leave room for adjustments but the trick is to identify productive iteration vs. overreaction. This year, it’s been particularly hard for several very specific reasons.

The run up to the Elections and the ever-growing but unknown cost of customer acquisition around BFCM will surely make the social media landscape highly volatile. I find it ironic that the Platforms ( Meta and Google ) are pushing out talking points to their agency collaborators to get final budgets and plans from their clients; though they are NOT telling them what ad costs will be.....how can a responsible marketer who actually cares about efficiency and profitability sign on to a plan without knowing the cost?

Also, in general, the consumer has been increasingly promotionally driven this year. This is not a new thing, it’s just the default strategy of brands straining for unrealistic growth expectations, and platforms are glad to take their money to help drive “eye popping” growth. The about face of investors now talking “profitable growth“ is a positive sign but that just makes the job that much harder. How do we plan for profitable growth in such an unstable environment, especially as many brands are planning to launch BFCM as early as October?

This is precisely why strategic planning is more important than ever. Since consumer distraction levels and acquisition costs are impossible to quantify, the other elements–the things you can control–are much more important. And it just so happens that those things require planning to do it properly.??

Product strategy and flow is the first critical issue. Consumers still want new exciting things; especially from brands they love. Of course this takes time and planning. Is your team ready for this turbulent marketplace? Do you have the right people in place, the right financial controls, operational process, access to capital and communication culture to react to this Marketplace?

Have you built the other, more predictable marketing capabilities like customer retention (email, SMS, and customer service), affiliates, influencers, organic posting, wholesale partners and brand collaborations? Again, these things take advance planning to execute well; especially since the data flow and returns are more difficult to quantify. One of the biggest benefits to planning is the confidence it instills in your team as they watch the execution unfold and others who are less prepared overreact to changing market conditions, and more often than not, follow the herd towards an unproductive outcome.?

So, the more volatile the market, the more you have to plan the things you CAN control and design your team and process to communicate frequently and effectively in order to capitalize on the craziness to come.