Are You Planning Your Marketing Based On Tomorrow or Yesterday?

Most planning is built on a foundation of the past. Psychologists and anthropologists would tell us it is hard-wired into the human condition. We build our lives and find comfort in the familiar. It can be exemplified by the four levels of learning:

Level 1 – Unconscious Incompetence – you don’t know that you don’t know. A baby doesn’t know it doesn’t know French.
Level 2 – Conscious Incompetence – you know that you don’t know. A child overhears people speaking French and asks his mother about it.
Level 3 – Conscious Competence – you know that you know. A student has studied French for a few years and makes a conscious effort to speak and understand the language.
Level 4 – Unconscious Competence – it becomes second nature. You converse and think in French without a conscious thought to do so. This is the level where confidence is at a maximum.

When we engage in planning, it is comfortable to build for the future based on what we have learned in the past. The longer we operate based on previous assumptions, the more they become engrained as a form of unconscious competence in our thinking. This can work well as long as things remain relatively unchanged and the future is approximated by an extrapolation of the past. However, in times of upheaval, Level 4 thinking can become an impediment to vitally needed alterations in the status quo.

Marketing is inextricably linked to economics and both of those disciplines are currently in a state of upheaval. The economy is in the midst of what some are appropriately labeling The Great Recession. Marketing, likewise, has been turned upside down by 1) a lack of confidence in its ability to produce a viable return on investment, and 2) a tidal shift in control with consumers, not marketers, holding the most power to affect brands.

It is times like these that the most successful marketers will shed the comfort of familiarity. They will decide it is prudent and necessary to embrace, at least for a while, Level 2 of the learning process: conscious incompetence. While it can be disconcerting to leave the terra firma of Level 4, it is the only way that innovation can begin once again. This might mean a radical shift in prioritizing your marketing efforts and budgets. It might mean a substantial realignment of people and processes. It may mean having to relearn that which you thought was already learned.

Things have changed in marketing, and “playing it safe” is more an illusion than an option. Successful marketers had better build a new foundation on tomorrow, because marketing (and economics) appears to be entering a new era, and those hanging onto the past will quickly lose their grip amidst new realities. The good news is that opportunities abound. All you have to do is relearn how to identify them.