Shooting from the Hip?? Become an “Anticipatory Brand” in 2016

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before the defeat.”                                          -Sun Tzu, The Art of War

What is your brand’s approach to customer engagement? Do you have a brilliant strategy to engage your customers, only to find you need different tactics by the time you execute?  Or are you shooting from the hip — guessing what the average customer needs next and hoping “spray & pray” marketing will find its mark?

If either is true, Sun Tzu’s wisdom — and the changing dynamics of brand engagement and consumer control — suggest you may be fighting an uphill battle. So how do you gain advantage?

Today, customers are informed about the brands they engage with, and they want those brands to deliver tailored experiences that anticipate their needs and illuminate a clear path to the best decision. Problem is, many brands aren’t delivering that. Instead, they’re reacting to customer actions with an ad hoc barrage of messages and offers. This crowds an already cluttered digital landscape, and creates unnecessary noise and confusion in the customer relationship.

3 Essentials of Anticipatory Brands

To be successful in shifting markets, brands must combine the right strategy with the right tactics and the most reliable foresight to guide the customer journey. We refer to those evolved brands as “Anticipatory Brands.”

What exactly do we mean by that? To be an Anticipatory Brand, you must have three core essentials:

1. Precision Foresights?: To drive successful outcomes, you must be able to predict what the arena will look like, and then have the conviction to execute against it. This includes anticipating the landscape, segmentation, and offerings, and implementing strategies that build your market share in both the short- and long-term.
2. Dynamic Tactics: It’s one thing to have confidence in the right strategy; it’s quite another to identify the right tactics to optimize the customer experience in real time. This requires foresight, planning, and innovative action at the moments of truth, rather than simply templating or implementing one-size-fits-all plans.
3. Agile Execution: Once you have foresight and the right strategy, and you have readied an arsenal of tactics to help you achieve it, you need to ensure that your entire organization executes in an organized but flexible fashion. The outcome of every action should give you the ability to quickly evaluate, assess, optimize, and supplement your strategy.

The goal is to stay a step ahead (of your customers and your competition) with strategy and tactics that help customers move most effectively along their journey. To do that, you have to anticipate.

The Path to Becoming an Anticipatory Brand

The challenge with ad-hoc execution is that it prevents you from seeing the entire landscape. When you shoot from the hip or enact strategies piecemeal, the likelihood of hitting your target is minimal. And, as Sun Tzu noted, that typically leads to slow execution or a whole lot of noise — neither of which helps you or your customer. 

The good news? Fine tuning your approach to customer engagement and evolving into an Anticipatory Brand isn’t overly complex or disruptive. But, like any change, you need to commit to taking the first step. The New Year is a perfect time to evaluate where you are on the path:

• Take a few moments to consider which of the three essentials is most challenging – what stands in the way of being a truly Anticipatory Brand?
• On the other hand, what has worked well?
• Where do you want to go from here?

Over the next few weeks I’ll dive deeper into each of the three essentials above and offer tips for implementing them with your 2016 marketing plans. Please contribute to the conversation: leave a comment or send me a direct message and let me know about your trials and triumphs on the route to victory. 

Sheryl Tullis, a former Army officer and West Point graduate, transitioned to a career in marketing because the language was familiar (air cover, campaigns, targeting, and tactics) but the shoes are nicer.                                         @sheryltu