Why does the dream of the fast racing car crashes when the tires hit the road track in reality, why doesn’t it run as smoothly as expected, even though the road map was set a hundred times before. The road blocks, bumps, the twists, and turns maybe the cause.
So why wasn’t that obvious when the road map was set? Why don’t perfectly planned marketing strategies always yield perfect results?
Strategic planning in marketing mainly involves, emphasizing the essence of preset vision, setting the guidelines of the track, designing the winning techniques, defining the winner’s eligibility criteria for the trophies, and painting the celebration ceremony among competitors.
But that planning usually misses the twists and turns, because it may miss the effort needed to bring the contestants to the first place, to bring that vivid dream of the celebration ceremony to life. It mainly misses the marketing strategy executives, they are those who are in constant contact with the process of implementing the strategy, accordingly they are the ones most capable of innovating and evolving the strategy implemented.
They are those who check the tire pressure, oil the engine, fix the car when it breaks, and one main trait found in their characters, they have persistence and perseverance flow in their veins, bumped by their hearts every minute of every day.
And don’t get me wrong, we are not trying to underestimate the efforts of the marketing strategy development process and the sweat it takes for determining, understanding the competitive edge of the product, how it can be superior, and the bloodshed in the battle to counter-act the competition.
Yet the framework of the strategy development, will never be set right without the feedback and the drivers’ stories, those executives, on the track constantly gearing up to race, so they will get that trophy back home.
So, that wraps up the concept in a single line, “It’s not only about a great idea, it’s also about how to implement it”
Allocate and manage resources in alignment with that strategy:
Check all of the mechanics of your car including oil, tire pressure, tire tread, steering fluid, brake fluid and brakes, be familiar with the track, know exactly when you should start braking and turning and even where your car should be positioned going into turns.
Align human capital with the strategy:
Then the executives should get schooled, let the drivers know why they are racing, why they have to drive as fast as they possibly can, learn the rules, when to brake, establishing a common language for communicating strategy, and enabling that communication at every level is nearly as important as creating the strategy itself.
Generate, organize and distribute the underlying detailed information necessary to make decisions:
Learn and be mindful of the flags. The green, the blue the black, the red, the yellow, the stationary, the waving, be mindful of these small details, in order to be able to take the right decision if there’s debris on the road, something is wrong with your car, a certain kind of danger is head and to deal with it.
A final road block to strategic execution is the inability of most companies to accurately measure true strategic performance, mainly because driving fast takes a lots of practice, so it’s not only about who gets the first place trophy or maximum financial returns, yet it’s about the key driving performance to the final trophy, the intangible efforts spent in the implementation process.
