A Marketing Plan is Always Needed

Ke$ha says "Stop! Is a snake really part of the plan?"

After my last blog post, “A Finely-Tuned Target More Successful with Brand Alliance Marketing”, a friend emailed to ask, “Who is the target market for Two-Way Listen?” I was incredulous thinking Chuck had the nerve to ask me this. I thought, “Isn’t it obvious?” Not to him it wasn’t and when I thought about it, I knew I hadn’t taken the time to define my audience or create a marketing plan.


Every good commercial endeavor has a marketing plan attached to it; a document that summarizes what has been learned about the relevant marketplace and its’ competitive landscape, guides how to achieve marketing objectives, and directs all marketing efforts for a certain period of time, usually one year. A missing marketing plan is NO SMALL OMISSION because without one, it is easy to lose sight of a product’s objectives.

There is a lot not to love about a marketing plan, including the planning process itself. Planning occurs so infrequently getting started usually leads to questions like “how do we do this again?” Once everyone remembers their role, creating the plan takes a month or two of product / market / historical / trend analysis; strategic objective defining; sales forecasting, expense forecasting, and breakeven estimating. Then, a contingency plan is created in case the first one doesn’t pan out.

As a product manager I do get a kick from thinking about what the process must be like when there is lots of creative freedom. Products that shake up our senses in a physical or playful way lend themselves to exalted or cringe-worthy marketing developments. I sometimes fantasize about how far I could push these type products…

• Jennifer Lopez’s flagship scent “Glow by JLo” goes after the club kids crowd with a tube of solid perfume on a decorative rope that doubles as a necklace; it’s call “Glow Stick.”

• Crayola leads in coloring innovation with non-toxic wax color pigments that glow and shift color on special paper like aurora borealis does in the northern night sky. Crayola brands both the crayons and the paper, and then sells them separately.

• Sales of Tutti Frutti flavored Jelly Belly beans have slipped since Little Richard’s decline in popularity. The once iconic bean is cut in favor of a tie-in with Gwen Stefani, a star still on the rise, to produce “Shit is Bananas” flavor.  

• K-Y Jelly’s TV advertising strategy is to run spots when whole families are likely to be watching; for instance, during the 2012 Olympic Games. The goal is to make viewers so uncomfortable in the presence of their children they quickly change the channel. Adult interests are piqued, but the product’s claims are never heard so sales are based on what consumers hope the product will do.

My holy grail of planning would be a product that incorporates all of the above. A portable personal lubricant that looks like jewelry; smells like JLo; tastes like bananas; is put on the body like lip gloss, then glows and shifts color incandescently. It sounds perfect for a Kesha fan like me!

The moral of this fantasy planning exercise illustrates a product might not go straight to hell without a marketing plan, but it could go straight to Kesha.