Order Up!

Healthy living is my new thing. I eat right when I can. I’m on the bike when I have a chance. Maura and I have even taking to backpacking and we are eagerly waiting to hike Georgia’s wettest trail with over 40 river fords, the Jacks River Trail. Healthy living is all about education. I’ve tried to learn about how food and exercise interact with the body. I know red wine is good for you so I intend to make it great for me. I mean really great. Really.

I learned early in this health kick about the importance of meals. Like how I need to eat breakfast. Years of a Guns ‘N Roses lifestyle have conditioned me to not eat breakfast save for two cups of coffee. No more. Plenty of diet experts and grocery check out line tip books have convinced me that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I force down yogurt and granola, and I have replaced the coffee with tea or water.

Lunch is another problem I have had to remedy. Before I decided to stop eating like a rouge dog, I would treat lunch with one of two answers. The first, resulting from no breakfast, would be to gorge on something high in carbs and blue cheese. The other scenario would be to continue my fast and worked through lunch living off coffee and the pieces of gum we keep for meetings in the conference room. The eventual dinner was pretty much always like you picture a meal on a pirate ship. I’d eat three meats, a starch and a wheat field and wash it down with a bottle of cheap French wine. Bon appetit.

I’ve changed my ways and I’m trying to teach others. While I have got a few who’ve listened to my moderation apotheosizing, I still am surrounded with those who starve and gorge, but this time I am not talking about food. A marketing plan is like a living thing. It loves to be nurtured. When it get beaten and bruised, all who love it feel its pain. And probably most important, it needs proper nourishment.

How do you feed your marketing plan? Are you stuffing it with presentations until it can’t walk only to find it hungry again in an hour? Is your plan getting all the right food groups like awareness building, knowledge building, sales support and defined action? Is it getting enough fiber? That is to say, is the old stuff that doesn’t really need to be around passing through and out or is your plan just plain constipated?

Marketing plans need to eat the right stuff for sure, but just as important is making sure plans are eating three square meals. There are no shortcuts to getting it right and skipping a meal can mean a loss of discipline or momentum later. Want to get that marketing plan back to health? Follow my easy meal plan. It works and despite not having a snazzy infomercial, I assure you its more rewarding than juicing.

Breakfast: Assorted fruits and nuts, bran muffin.

There are only a few focus groups I’ve observed where the attendees would be classified as assorted fruits and nuts. The bigger point is research now will quell that empty feeling come lunch time. And the bran muffin? Sometimes you need to clean things out. Like unproven ideas, wrong convictions and assumptions and the type of business minutia that makes you feel irregular, bloated and gassy.

I am constantly surprised at the people who try to skip research and wonder why they feel awful later in the day. It is just like when you skip breakfast. You end up gorging on something else and wonder why your stomach is upset. My advice: eat your breakfast. Force it down if you have to. It will get easier with time and your brand will certainly be healthier for it.

Lunch: Soup, salad, sandwich and strategy.

There is nothing like a little bit of everything to satisfy a lunchtime craving. Great strategies are just like that. They take all wants and desires into account. I’m not saying if you want a fried banana and mayonnaise sandwich that you should have one. I am saying take into account the need and address all of it with different means. Sales, operations, distributors and others are all salivating for what a wholesome strategy can accomplish.

Yet so many marketers decide to work through lunch. They see lunch as a luxury and seem to think that some gut feeling overrides the need for a strategy. Well, listen up my hungry friends. That gut feeling is hunger and that growling stomach is the boss or the analysts or someone else counting on marketing to be getting its essential vitamins and minerals.

Tactics, it’s what’s for dinner.

Nobody skips dinner. It’s so much food. Why there are so many TV spots and baseball team sponsorships and, oooh, looky there is a gravy boat full of shipper displays. Nobody skips dinner. In fact, they just save room for dinner. Marketers are skipping the research and strategy table and piling up a heaping load of tactics. Another plus to dinner is all the company. When you had no one to eat with over research or strategy, suddenly there are scores of media, agency, accounting people posing as marketing consultants and a table full of other dinner guests just waiting to stuff whatever they’re serving down your trap. Is that a delicious interactive website with a viral video served on the side?

Marketers skip the first two crucial meals and gorge on the other. With no room for research or strategy they are stuffed fat with tactics that have no nourishment. In the end, all that is left is the carcass of a poorly cooked sponsorship, a vintage bottle that claimed to have a clutter-busting ad campaign but ended up being empty, and a really bad case of heartburn because while the meal had some satisfaction, the meal was not free and you got stuck with the check.

Order up.

I’m not serving up what hasn’t been served a thousand times by others. Trout and Ries have been screaming for years for people to stop skipping strategy and research. Industry magazines are asking when marketers are going to stop binging on fad food and start planning their marketing meals with discipline. I imagine the problem is that many of us speaking up for a balanced diet are just about as influential as the middle school gym coach. We can tell you all day long that you should eat right, but gurus, the media and even perhaps your friends want to sell you on a plan that takes no discipline, allows you to eat whatever and whenever with no consequences and will make everyone like the slimmer sexier you. Friends, that does not happen. It has never happened.

Juice by Jeff.

Maura bought me the bike for Christmas and I’m still on it. I’m losing some weight, but I have to say the best thing is learning to live a healthy lifestyle. It changes the way I see my meals and exercise, and I think it’s the right step towards making this heath thing a keeper. Changing the way your marketing plan eats works the same way. Once you have committed to eating right and at the right times, you begin to feel better and the change of perspective means you’re more likely to stick on the right track for the long haul. When hunger growls, consider good, fresh research, well balanced strategy and tactics that are part of a well balanced diet. It pays to eat well. Because, as we all know, you are what you eat.