How to use the 5Cs situation Analysis on your Brand

In marketing there are only a few straight answers when planning the life cycle of a brand. It always depends on the manager’s perspective and the market circumstances whether a business will move forward or stay put on a given decision upon her risk assessment.

The 5Cs (consumer, company, collaborators, competition and climate) situation analysis is just another tool that helps you assess each opportunity in front of you. The output of the analysis depends on your perspective and the decision will always be yours.

Strategic Marketing

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Ever wonder if you are spending the right amount of time in your daily tasks? Are you being effective? What should be marketing’s most time-consuming tasks? and what our marketing counterparts are doing?

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After reading a book on Do More Great Work I started to analyze what I was spending my time on. I figure that most of my time was invested in:

• Creating Strategic Plans and developing the back-up information.
• Following-Up on the execution of approved plans
• Following-Up on sales stats
• Creating VIP reports.
• Developing Branding Campaigns and following the execution and results.
• Calculating ROI or ROAS
• Researching and understanding the consumer.

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After doing this list I wondered if this made any sense. I wondered how my colleagues spent their times and decided to do a little benchmark with my peers. I talked to some FMCG colleagues (locally and from abroad) and the amount of time invested in each task varies from company to company, but we all agree that Strategic Plans, Performance Reviews and Bosses Reports collect 70-80% of our available time.

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In summary, a Brand Manager must be a strategic-minded person. But what is a Marketing Strategy?

According to Wikipedia:

Marketing strategy is a method of focusing an organization’s energies and resources on a course of action which can lead to increased sales and dominance of a targeted market niche. A marketing strategy combines product development, promotion, distribution, pricing, relationship management and other elements; identifies the firm’s marketing goals, and explains how they will be achieved, ideally within a stated timeframe.

I like to think of Strategic Marketing as anything you do at consumer level that will vary favorably your brand’s results (sales, TOM, Awareness, Profits, etc) in a significant way.

Some of my peers sometimes think that they’re not as strategic as they should because either the results aren’t as great as they’d hoped or because they don’t spend as much time asking for approval and doing follow-ups as I do.

This is what I say to them: “THINK BIG”

Big ideas are the source of either big wins or big failures.

The challenge: to overcome your natural fear of doing it wrong, to deliver a big failure and to be reprimanded or even lose your job.

How to do it:

1. Analyze the impact that this idea will have on the brand. This will help you assure that you have a strategic idea
2. Ask your peers what the think of the idea. If they don’t doubt on executing it, your probably not thinking big enough. Your idea is really big when doubts start to arise and people ask you if you’re sure you want to do it.
3. Avoid thinking of bad results. Think of their causes (the will help you prepare to avoid those results).
4. Think of the great results. This will keep you motivated along the way.
5. After the Idea is approved. Talk with passion about it. Involve your people
6. Follow up the execution and gain your trust. You will later use this trust to deploy bigger ideas.

Related Articles

• The 8 D’s Of Successful Marketing (thebrandchef.com)