The Lightning Strike Strategy: How To Plan An Annual Marketing Strategy That Solidifies Your Leadership Position (Part I)
2022 is right around the corner.
Itâs getting to be that time of year.
Before you round up your fellow executives, VPs, department heads, strategists, analysts, and marketers, block off the calendar, and engage in a little annual marketing planning, read this.
We promise, it will make all the difference. (Better yet, bring all your executives aboard and start 2022 with everyone on your team reading Category Pirates.)
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Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Most annual marketing planning is an orgy of frustration and mental masturbation.
(An image of a conference roomâor, in todayâs digital world, a bunch of Zoom boxes muting and unmutingâof executives tripping over each other, spurting out âcreative ideasâ and a long list of âP1 prioritiesâ should come to mind.)
At best, a company will audit its metrics from the previous year and decide which initiatives to spend more money incrementally improving. At its worst, the CFO is the one coming up with the slogan thatâs going to go on the billboards the company is planning to run for their next product launch. Either way, annual marketing planning is usually about as fun and productive as getting hit with a hockey puck in the privates.
The first problem with marketing plans is most of them start with last yearâs marketing plan as the template.
But legendary plans are about creating a different future. Not continuing the past.
And as your shipmates, we are here to help you right the ship.
The 3 Pillars Of Every Great Marketing Strategy: Information Wars, Air Wars, and Ground Wars
To begin, itâs important we outline what a legendary marketing strategy looks like.
Every startup, company, and creator is fighting 3 different types of wars at the same time: the war for who frames the problem, names and claims the solution, and as a result owns the narrative (The Information Wars); the war for who is then able to most effectively âsellâ that narrative at scale (The Air Wars); and the war for who can best convert new recruits to the war effortâprospect to prospect, customer to customer, consumer to consumer, and thus make the cash register sing. (The Ground Wars).
Hereâs a quick summary of each:
Information Wars: This is what sets the strategic context. (Context is everything.) Itâs the combination of ways in which you educate the world about the category youâre designing, AND, learning from your Superconsumers (and amplifying their voices) to accelerate your effectiveness both in the air and on the ground. (This is more focused on POV marketing / word of mouth than anything else.)
Air Wars: In many ways, marketing is âSales at scale.â Air Wars are the high-level strategic marketing you do in service of the new and different category you are creating in the world, all the while positioning yourself as the leader. These efforts are more focused on demand creation.
Ground Wars: This is tactical marketing (often at the point-of-sale and heavily integrated with sales) that supports your strategic efforts marketing the category and driving near-term revenue. (Ca-Ching, Ca-Ching.) These efforts are more focused on demand capture and lead generation.
Now, letâs walk through what this looks like in action.
The Story of Malibu Mylk
Every once in a while, we Pirates hop aboard another pirate ship to lend a helping hand.
Malibu Mylk is a startup we have been working with to help create a new sub-category called âwhole-plant organic flax milk.â Within the mega-category of âalternative milkâ (basically anything that qualifies as milk but isnât dairy), there is a sub-category with a strong tailwind called âplant-based milk.â However, not everyone jives with plant-based milk. Some people canât drink certain types of alternative milks because they have a soy allergy, or a nut allergy. This was Brittanyâs story, the founder of Malibu Mylk. When Brittany Fuisz was dealing with some health issues, she went to see a functional medicine doctor who told her she needed to eliminate dairy, nuts, gluten, and soy from her diet.Â
The problem was, every âmilk alternativeâ in the market had some sort of allergen. Soy milk is made from soybeans. Almond milk is made from nuts. Oat milk is made from grains (the vast majority of which contain some form of gluten). For someone going 100% allergen free, there were no âalternative milkâ options.
So, Brittany created oneâout of flax.
The Information War: Educating customers on the benefits of whole-plant organic flax.
The first war Malibu Mylk has to fight is educating people on why they should consider flax milk as a viable âmilk alternative.â
Remember, The Information War is all about three things: your unique POV (what are you saying?), your Languaging (how are you saying it?), and your Superconsumers (who do you want repeating what youâre saying?). In Malibu Mylkâs case, this meant helping design new language to talk about this new type of product.Â
Some of what we came up with:
âWhole-plantâ as distinct from âplant-based.â Many foods that arenât actually healthy for you (and are filled with other unhealthy ingredients) can call themselves âplant-based,â so using old language to describe a new & different thing would be a mistake. Too many âplant-based milksâ strain out the majority of the plant and then add in a lot of non-plant baddies (like rapeseed oil) that many would be surprised to find out about. Actually, most âplant-based milksâ are kind of like how some movies âbased on real eventsâ end up being marginally based on the truth.
100% allergen free. Flax, in and of itself, isnât what the customer cares about. What makes flax interesting is that, in the context of (mega-category) âalternative milksâ and (sub-category) âplant-based milks,â flax milk is the only one that is 100% allergen free. This is the *position* the product then owns in the customers mind.
The benefits of flax. Once the customer understands that position, itâs also great to tell them flax is the largest source of vegan omega-3s, aids in digestion, is anti-inflammatory, and also sustainable for the environment (whereas it takes over 20 gallons of water to produce a single glass of almond milk).
The Information War for Malibu Mylk is all about (in this order) getting this POV, and these words, into the mouths of Superconsumers of health, wellness, and âalternative milks.â
But wait, thereâs more!
Pirate Eddie (the genius he is) then discovered something interesting. Within the niche of health, wellness, and âalt milkâ Superconsumers is actually an even more specific, more potent niche of more relevant Supers for this particular product. (We canât tell you who though because thatâs the *secret sauce* thatâs worth $5 million bucks.)
These Superconsumers are not just of âhealthâ in general, but their health in a more specific context. Which just so happens to be Brittanyâs story as well. (This is a great example of Founder/Category alignmentâthe right person, solving the right problem, with a highly relevant personal story and perspective.) This is the level of nuance you should be thinking about within your own marketing. And why itâs so crucial to have clarity around your unique POV (Pirate Christopherâs specialty), new words that communicate your different POV (Pirate Coleâs specialty), and a data-driven understanding of who your Superconsumers are (Pirate Eddieâs specialty).
See why they call us the Category Pirates?
The Air Wars for Malibu Mylk are then all about getting relevant media, influencers, and of course their Superconsumers to talk about this different POV at scaleâand for the company to publish content and launch campaigns that educate other Supers on this different POV at scale.Â
The Ground Wars for Malibu Mylk mean Brittany interacting with relevant Superconsumers herself, or empowering her sales team to interact with and educate Supers directly. For example, something Brittany does when she goes to the grocery store is she walks around and looks for women who put almond, oat, or soy milk in their carts, stops them, introduces herself, and offers them the opportunity to give flax milk a try. This is hand-to-hand âcombatâ, and ground war marketing at its finest. This is a Dam The Demand strategy IRL (âin real life,â for all our Boomer Pirates out there). Malibu Mylk then does the same thing in the digital world at the point of purchase. When someone searches for Oat Milk online, they are likely to see an ad for Malibu Mylkâs flax milk.
The key is to align all three.Â
The mix matters.Â
When a company over-rotates and disproportionately spends more marketing dollars and people hours in any one of these areas, they usually run into a problem. Either they spend too much time and money or both trying to âsell at scaleâ (Air Wars), not realizing they donât have boots on the ground (Ground Wars) to effectively convert those prospects into customers. Or they become too myopic and focused on winning each individual battle (Ground Wars) that they forget what cause theyâre fighting for in the first place (Information War).
Where marketing planning goes wrong:
Unfortunately, some companies are extremely myopic.
All they do is ground wars.Â
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