Two blog postings opened my eyes about marketing. The first deals with the new 4Ps by John Sviokla and Antony Paoni called "Marketing Remix."
The second is a very useful approach to marketing planning (what a great oxymoron) by Kelly Odell called "The World’s Shortest Marketing Plan."
With both party’s permission, I was "inspired" by their thoughts to create a version 2.0 of Kelly’s marketing plan. I’ve seen a lot of marketing plans in my day–99.9% of them were way too long. This length is perfect for most products and services.
Click here to get the document. It’s a Word document so that you can fill in the cells with your answers.
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Summed up very nicely in just twenty five questions.
An interesting addition (not to ‘feature-creep’ what is a very tight document) would be to add answer squares and confine responses to no more than 20 words each.
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Kip,
I thought that people would just write in the cells, but I see your point. I changed the blog to make this clearer. Thanks for pointing this out.
Guy
As always great stuff. This isn’t really a blog in the traditional sense. That’s what I like about it. I guess nobody would really want to hear about the time you got a really great nap anyways.
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Thanks! You’re very kind. I haven’t had a nap in years. Frankly, I haven’t slept well in years. :-)
Guy
First, I liked the post a lot. Writing marketing plans has proven elusive for me in the past. I will give this a try.
One thing that struck me was that while the matrix is very good as a cognitive checklist our marketing actions need to be organized chronologically in order to be actionable for the organization.
At a first glance, I see two chronological plans: Product and preference could be combined into a “Product Plan”. Presence, persuasion and price could be combined into a “Promotion Plan”. These two plans would distill the contents of the matrix into something the organization could execute, which as we know is 99% of transpiration necessary to get the job done…
Björn Stansvik
Great links. For anyone looking for The World’s Shortest Business Plan, it can be found here:
http://startup.wikia.com/wiki/TRC_textbook
This was written by Gavin Chait as a textbook for the Thousand Rand Challenge, a microlending competition to give about 170 US to the best 1,000 business plans submitted across South Africa. Even though it is designed to be used by those with no more than a third grade education, it was paradoxically comprehensive enough to get me an A+ in an undergrad entrepreneurship class at Cornell. Go figure.
Guy, I’ve been trying to explain what a marketing plan is (and what it isn’t) to colleagues as we’re writing a new business plan for the company… this will help a lot!
Great brief plan! But as you talked about large/long marketing plans, isn’t that because one usually plans all the marketing activities for the financial year also in yourn plan? Hey if you’re trying to condense strategy into a plan, the word doc matrix helps. But if you’re going to be planning each and every marketing activity with budgets, responsibilities, guidelines to measure ROI etc, you just can’t help the plan getting a little long :)
Also, Guy, after seeing the document, I wondered if you’ve read this… http://www.ms-studio.com/articles.html
Guy,
I don’t want to brag about it :) but the revised marketing mix is an old hat. In fact, back in 2000 I came up with one of the proposed new Ps – Personalization – leaving Product, Price and Promotion intact as only their nature – but not the definition – changed (i.e. Personalisation is applied to the other three Ps). As a result of that thinkining, I was judged a finalist in the UK New Marketer of the Year 2000 Award.
So, if I were to do a similar “P” exercise today, I would go for Product, Price, Personalization and Peer-to-peer.
Guy,
Think in the usual VC. Imagine his face in your head.
And no you can maintain that this person wants to read a marketing plan of half A4?
I don’t think so
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Actually, the usual VC would probably like a one paragraph explanation of the marketing plan as well as one-paragraph explanations of engineering, personnel, etc. All these paragraphs would add up to a one to two page exec summary–which is all we really care about.
Guy
Guy et al…
Just a little thought about this posting… (just click on my signature)
Very cool. What would you do if someone gave this to you (attached to their exec summary)? Would you take it seriously?
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Doug,
If an entrepreneur handed me something this short, tight, and cogent, I would be very happy and take her very serious. The caveat is that the cells cannot be filled with bull shiitake stuff like “strategic partnership with MySpace.”
Because shot bull shiitake is still bull shiitake.
Guy
Guy,
Oh, I’ll let you be the judge on how to continue with your blog. I just wanted to point out to all the readers out there that we must not fall into the trap of producing paragraphs and paragraphs just for the sake of it.
I’ve read some other comments here that were a little more direct – and perhaps sharper – about the sense (or lack thereoff) in some of the latest postings.
I think that a blog filled by what the author wants to put in it. It’s success however is the readers ‘property’ and they will decide about the future of, in this case your, blog.
I guess that most readers become fed up with rereading the same topics over and over and over again just to discover a – been there, done that – type of feeling… ( jeez I kinda have the feeling that I’ve read that in the long gone days you were with Apple – might be wrong, if so, my apologies ).
Time is to precious to us to waste it on things we already know. Off course a lot of people will be new to the topics, but hey… you can’t make everybody happy
Anyway its your blog… you decide mate…
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Ray,
You lost me. Are you saying that my postings are repetitious? I’ve never posted a marketing plan article before.
Guy
This is hands-down the best “marketing plan” I have ever seen.
Only thing: I wouldn’t call it a marketing plan per se, I would call it a product launch plan umm checklist umm stuff to figure out.
In other words: have meaningful non-BS stuff in each of the boxes, and there’s at least a good chance that a) you know what you’re doing, and b) you know how you’re going to do it, and c) you’ve covered most of the essential bases.
Great!
Rules for Revolutionaries
Guy Kawasaki: The World’s Shortest Marketing Plan, Version 2.0.
I read Guy Kawasakis Rules…
Guy … spot ON!
Many people don’t remember that a Plan is a p-l-a-n. It’s not cast in concrete, it’s open to change (or had BETTER be!) and, therefore, need only hit the high points. Anything more detailed and you will:
1. Hamstring any efforts by way of too many restrictions;
B. Be less likely to change because, after all, think of all the work involved in changing such a detailed plan.
Kudos.
Thank you guy for pointing out these articles. A new statement. We are definitely rethinking marketing approach.
From the world of
Well known product marketing guru/VC/advisor/author Guy Kawasaki has a post on “Marketing Remix” and he’s even created a great tool that incorporates the concepts of Marketing Remix that he calls “The World’s Shortest Marketing Plan, Version 2.0”. Very…
Hi Guy,
Just wanted to add my view to the range expressed above.
As I commented on Kelly’s blog, I really like simplification of marketing plans and documents, so your evolution of the original shortest marketing plan is great.
I’m kinda on the fence about the marketing remix angle, but I have an open mind.
I guess the proof will be in the using, so I may try using yours Kelly’s on the same project sometime soon, and see which works best in practice for my type of projects.
thanks again and keep up the good work
simon
Simon Wakeman
Marketing, PR and internet consultant
www.simonwakeman.com/journal
I agree that a marketing plan must be flexible and ever-changing. It’s evolution will cause the strongest techniques to rise to the top.
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logviewer.net: http://www.logviewer.net
theblogclub.net: http://www.theblogclub.net
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This is nice marketing plan!
Bloggers Digest (II) – der kürzeste Marketing-Plan der Welt
Was? Warum? Wann? Wie? Wer?
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Und wenn einer den kürzesten Marketing-Plan der Welt a
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