Marketing Strategy:

Find what works,

then tune it.

The old cliché “here today gone tomorrow” sums up the fragility of many good companies. As Grandma always said, “Stuff happens.” And today it can happen like a lightening bolt.

Business plans and mission statements can be obsolete before you get home from your brainstorming retreat. That’s why a strategy that finds tactics that work, then does more of them, is hard to beat. (Yeah, I know also hard to sell.)

Everybody wants to know where there’re going. We’ve heard if over and over: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there.” Well, look at Columbus. His strategy was wrong, but look where his tactics got him (and us).

We can’t control destiny, the market, or what competitors do. But we can control our response. Colonel Harland Sanders is a good example. At age 65 when a new highway siphoned traffic away from his restaurant he didn’t just close the door. He packed up his chicken recipe, and boogied down the road from Corbin, KY to build one of the Nation’s biggest franchises.

The Colonel’s strategy that built his empire came after he found a tactic that worked.

The marketing clock runs on double time. Today, that good old leisurely bell shaped curve of a product’s life cycle can look more like a rocket followed by a bomb. That’s why a little insecurity is a good thing. It makes you hustle while the competition is still home strategizing.

Tip for big and little guys: Read Bottom-Up Marketing, by Al Ries and Jack Trout. It makes a solid case for why smart marketers should get down in the trenches to discover what must be done.