How to Make Better Marketing Decisions

For many companies, coming up with a marketing plan is mainly about evaluating past results, tweaking them, and perhaps get inspiration from competitors, i.e. doing exactly what others do and thus ending up with mediocre results at best. Likewise, many marketing plans revolve purely around deciding on an agency or ad frequency and then wait for others to come up with ideas – ideas constrained by budgets and bad decision-making by top management. But at the end of the day, marketing is all about creativity, and creativity is in short supply. Bringing creativity into the planning process is difficult, mainly because you probably have exactly the same people as last year sitting around the table, steeped in group-think and stifled by the decades of experience the CMO or CEO, or worse, company owner, use to justify shooting down any idea that is in any way risky or simply different. The reasons why 90% of companies end up with (b) is primarily psychological.