Strategic Marketing Planning for 2021

Overview

It’s never been more important to re-think our customer-centric marketing strategies.  Moving forward, low consumer confidence and financial difficulties will make it harder to acquire and retain customers. As a result, we need to reinvent our product and service values, restore trust in our brands, redefine our strategic marketing priorities and rationalise our budgets. To help you work through this process, CIM have developed this course to refocus your strategy and planning process. The course is delivered by leading industry practitioners in weekly 90-minute sessions over a six-week period.

Week 1: Innovation
Businesses need to continually offer new bundles of value if they are to keep ahead of customer expectations and deal with the 'new normal'. This is what genuine innovation is about and the good news is that it doesn't always require new products. Smart new delivery, ingenious new uses, and stellar customer support are where most innovation can be found – and this session gives you the tools to develop them quickly and cost effectively.

Week 2: Trust
Nothing gets sold without trust. Consumers and firms have to believe that vendors will deliver the value they promised – and this is true more than ever as we confront a new economy. This makes trust an essential part of your brand, marcomms, or sales strategy. This session explains what it means to trust a company, how to earn (rather than manufacture) it, when it can be lost, and why firms should aim at better trust, not more trust.

Week 3: Marketing Priorities
Marketers now have to confront the challenges of accelerated disruption and significant economic downturn. This session looks at the need to make fast assessments in new contexts and how the role of Marketing and stakeholder expectations have changed. We will focus on marketing's priorities in the "new normal", re-directing the marketing budget, to implement your own marketing mix 'MOT', to re-interrogate effectiveness and review your capability and capacity.

Week 4: Strategic Marketing
Strong decision-making skills are required in a disrupted, 'new normal' environment and this session focuses on how marketers should approach strategic planning and implementation. We will look at marketing/digital strategy changes and working with new planning cycles. How to leverage Marketing's eco-system (including optimising your approach with agency partners) and how to make faster decision-making within a strategic framework.

Week 5: Brand
In uncertain times, managing your brand effectively may help put your business in the strongest position, as brands need to focus on the right priorities to ensure they remain relevant and connected with customers. We will look at managing the impact on brands when consumer confidence is low and how it is vital to understand changes in consumer psychology and behaviour and how building the right phased plan to recovery offers clear benefits to brands sharpening their commercial and customer focus at this time.

Week 6: New Marketing Approaches
From agile, thoughtful innovation and product stretches to new channel initiatives, community initiatives, marketing campaigns and communications, the ability for marketers to act swiftly and execute differently is key to every business facing into this changed commercial environment. We will highlight businesses across various sectors that have shown us new marketing approaches that are working, share great examples we can draw on for inspiration and discuss what marketing’s ‘new good’ is beginning to look like.

Who should attend?

This is a course for marketing managers, marketing directors, brand managers, entrepreneurs, consultants and agency directors who wish to rethink their marketing strategy in these extraordinary times.

Learning outcomes

• Innovation: How to create value for your customers
• Trust: Why trust is an essential part of your marketing strategy
• Marketing Priorities: How to define the new marketing mix
• Strategic Marketing: Working with new planning cycles
• Brand: How to ensure your brand remains relevant
• Case Studies: Review marketing approaches that are working