The New Marketing Leader

Yesterday I told the story of the birth of "Merchandise Productivity" and "Marketing Productivity". Those concepts evolved significantly, especially once I began doing consulting work and had to ferret-out the real reasons (merchandise and new customers) businesses were failing.

As a New Marketing Leader, you are typically being thrust into a bad situation. If your brand was "winning" it would not be making changes.

So you need to chart your own course ... you know what you should do, you know what is likely to work and not work ... and yet, you've got a ton of co-workers who have expectations of you ... their expectations. They don't know anything about marketing, but they have strong ideas about what you should do, nonetheless. And if you don't do what they expect you to do, you're a moron!!

So you need to set expectations from Day One.

There's nothing wrong with soliciting advice from your merchant, inventory, tech, and creative partners. Go ahead and let the Operations Director tell you what she heard about at a Woodside Research conference.

Then, after soliciting advice, craft your plan for your brand using The Great Eight above. Take their ideas, and repackage them based on what you know needs to happen. Communicate to all what you are going to do via each category above. Then get busy ... and when somebody has an idea to increase conversion rates by 30%, fit the idea into The Great Eight, where the idea likely falls into the "Acquisition" category or the "Optimization Program" or "Winning Merchandise". Turn the tables ... put the responsibility for the increase on your co-workers.

Set expectations from Day One. Use The Great Eight to structure plans and discussions.

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