How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up

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And you have to apply your imagination, understanding and analysis in different measures according to the problem at hand. We need time and space to think alone… There’s a reason we have our best ideas lying in the bath… Technology companies are aware of this. You can quickly become so efficient your brand goes out of business because you spend nothing on marketing.

When you're working for a company, it's easy to fool yourself into believing that everyone outside the company feels strongly towards it. With all due respect to Byron Sharp (whose book I still consider as narrow minded) these guys managed to deliver very complex concepts in a very insightful way. As a rule of thumb, it will always be better to err on the side of brand up-weighting rather than down-weighting.

When circumstances do change, you are better prepared to face them because you do not cling to a desire of how things should be. But if you scratch under the surface, there are enough reasoned, intelligent, evidence led marketers fighting the good fight.

Taking the time to elevate our perspective beyond the present, thinking about our process and craft, questioning how and why we approach our work the way we do is vital if we want to improve. For example, extra share of voice (media spend) produces bigger shifts in market share in high consideration categories than low consideration ones (see below). Reality A: She had to move to a small town to help her mother recover from the recent death of her husband.

They don't take advantage of the early stages of a market when functional differences are likely to be wider, brand perceptions and habits are less entrenched and it is much easier to expand the market. Sadly for loyalty marketing fans, our analysis shows that regardless of the nature of the purchase decision, penetration is always the main driver of growth.

Oh the mud… and despite the 2am mopping and cleaning session, our youngest still asked after he’d ventured downstairs the next morning, “why is everything in the kitchen sticky? The change in group energy level—all these are more potent indicators of what’s really going on in people minds than the words they use. We were extremely confident (as it turned out, justifiably so) that we couldn't go wrong in Sicily – wherever we would end up, there would be plenty of top-quality sights to see, coffee to be sipped in piazzas etc. They gleefully spent most of the day relaying their worst teenage party experiences and boy, did they have some stories to tell (spoiler – as you’d expect, almost all of them vomit related…).Next time you find yourself wondering where your career will go, if you will find love or have kids, take some deep conscious breathes and allow yourself to be comfortable with “I don’t know. Google’s London office has a proper old-fashioned library for people to work in, with a strict policy of silence. You Can Never Be Too Efficient: “ROI can be a useful measure—for comparing different ways of spending budget, for example.