I recently had the privilege of guest lecturing at Bentley University’s eMarketing class, hosted by CC Chapman. The most important point of the evening was that strategy is where we must always start as marketers.
- If we don’t know why we’re doing something, we don’t have a winning strategy.
- If we don’t have SMART goals, we don’t have a winning strategy.
- If we don’t respect the limits time imposes on us, or our resources and competitors’ strategies, we don’t have a winning strategy.
In Leading Innovation and Marketing Blue Belt, I share this formula for strategy:
Strategy is goals times methods, limited by time and the environment.
- If we’ve got the right goals but the wrong methods, our strategy will fail.
- The reverse is also true.
- No goals or no methods? Multiply anything times a zero and we get zero.
If you’re starting marketing and you’re not talking goals and methods, or constraints on those goals and methods, you’re not talking strategy — and strategy is where you must start.
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Thank you again for coming into class. I know my Bentley students benefitted greatly from your years of experience.
It was fun to watch them ask so many questions. That to me shows how interested they were.