Tactical marketing represents roughly 8% of the brand management process, and communications is roughly 25% of that 8%!

Unfortunately, too many marketers invest upwards of 80% of their time and budget in pulling the tactical ‘communications’ levers, neglecting the need to invest time and budget in other more important brand and marketing disciplines, which should underpin and drive tactical decisions.

Despite only 5% of a category likely to be in-market at a given time, marketers have become obsessed with not only tactics, but the promotional part of the 4Ps, driven by short-term performance marketing goals designed to measure monthly and quarterly KPIs.

To avoid falling into the scenario of tactics without strategy, you must invest time and budget across the two phases of brand management or marketing planning that should precede Tactics: Diagnosis and Strategy.

You should invest broadly equal amounts of your time and/or budget for each of these phases as they are multiplicative, meaning that the sum is greater than any of the individual phases, miss one out and you’re going to limit your success at best, bomb at worst.

Here are a few suggested topics to incorporate in your planning to avoid being a bad marketer obsessed with tactics:

• Market orientation research
• Market segmentation & targeting
• Brand and product positioning
• Purchase funnel with conversion data
• Long and Short campaigns
• Distinctive design codes

Marketing Lab is a brand management and marketing consultancy working with regional, national, and international businesses to mitigate marketing investment risk, ensuring more informed decisions are made with a view to improving sales and profitability, growing market share, and building brand equity. Request a FREE 30-minute brand management consultation.