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Getting things approximately right is better than getting them exactly wrong, so you want your marketing plan to work as an overall strategy and not simply as a series of tactical details. To implement marketing plans, there are 15 factors that matter. |
Implementation profile |
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Why is the failure rate for new consumer products about 85%? And why has this rate not changed significantly in 30 years despite significant advances in marketing science? In a word, the answer is bias. Or in two words, ego involvement. Marketing managers are too close to their own products to make unbiased decisions. This insight is easiest to see with new products because new products that do not fulfill consumer needs or wants will fail. Thanks to new marketing techniques and research findings, product managers have at their disposal an array of tools to help identify consumer attitudes and preferences. These tools range from simple market surveys to sophisticated conjoint analyses. Managers can examine the findings from such studies before making a decision to continue with product development, test market a product or attempt full-scale commercialization. But when they do look at study results, product managers usually see more than is there. "Standing in front of industry analysts two years ago, Starbucks executives gleefully proclaimed that the coffee chain's rapid-fire expansion was so successful, it could even support two outlets in one building. Not only that, executives bragged, but the brand was so strong it could be used to sell everything from Scrabble boards to breakfast sandwiches.
Company executives now freely admit that such thinking is largely to blame for the woes that led to Tuesday’s announcement that Starbucks will close 600 U.S. stores and eliminate thousands of jobs."
Source: MSNBC.COM, July 2, 2008 Since product managers usually have at least some profit and loss responsibility for their product and in all cases have high exposure for product success or failure, they are expected to be ego involved. To the extent that a new product is a pet project, they are expected to be further ego involved. The rub is that, because of their ego involvement with new products or existing products, managers overestimate demand, setting off a chain of events that results in actual or relative product failure. Due to overconfidence—itself the result of bias due to ego involvement—products get launched that should not be launched. Resources go to products that do not deserve them. Managers may succeed but their products fail. Ego involvement can be controlled through the makeup of product teams and overconfidence through the solicitation of "outside" views. By understanding and controlling for these factors, companies can get things approximately right rather than exactly wrong. Can you doubt that Starbuck's management would have been better off reading the papers cited below—and following their advice—rather than letting ego dictate a marketing plan that threatens the entire concept? Besides ego involvement, there are many other behavioral and organizational factors that get in the way of sound marketing decisions. These include situational factors such as management by common sense (which is inconsistent with management by logic), management factors such as lack of organizational support for marketing, marketing factors such as departmental conflict (as in the traditional marketing vs. R&D friction) and individual factors such as personal stake, where, if there is nothing to gain, individuals will not try to gain at all and goal congruence, where, if an individual's goals are not the same as the organization's, individuals will be less likely to cooperate.The Implementation Profile1 was designed to help managers implement projects and systems in organizations. The idea was to compare (profile) a project against an empirical database of other successful and unsuccessful projects. The resulting profile would give managers an indication of the current project's chance for success as well as guidelines for managing the implementation process. This was done for 12 factors including management support, personal stake, goal congruence and availability of resources to get the implementation job done. By analogy, the 15 marketing implementation factors can be used to profile the marketing organization against a benchmark. If there are problems or issues with any of the factors, the chance of implementation failure will increase. Since the implementation profile concept applies to both new products and existing products, a poor profile would indicate a high chance of failure. But rather than leaving things to fate, the profile provides guidelines for where and how to improve the product's chance of success. Success is good. An implementation profile shows how to achieve it. ___________________________1Randall L. Schultz and Dennis P. Slevin, "The Implementation Profile," Interfaces, Vol. 13, No. 1 (February 1983), pp.87-92. |
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Summary of the marketing logic
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Follow up Original paper reporting experimental results Managerially-oriented paper on ego involvement Theory of decision making, ego and practical considerations paper |
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