Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Why, how could they not be aligned?

Are you saying your business has a set of strategies, and your marketing has a set of strategies designed to achieve different objectives? How on earth could that happen?

If you Map your Strategy and have the Customer Value Proposition at the Heart of the Business Strategy, then cascade the Marketing Strategy from the Business Strategy, it's hard to see how you could go wrong.

You can't come up with an alignment-measurement factor. It either aligns, or it doesn't. 25% doesn't count, in my view.

Can you be a bit more specific? What is the business strategy? What is the marketing strategy? What are the processes that support each? Do they have different objectives?

A few more details, and maybe we can pinpoint the way for you to go.

Our colleague, ASVP/Chris B is correct. In the strategic process, when you develop a Strategic plan, the marketing strategy is a part of it, just as the manufacturing and engineering strategy is. Think of the strategic process as a layered approach where you start at a broad level with data and analysis and work down to the detailed actions to get to where you want to drive the business.

Within a strategic plan, which is aimed at a three to five year horizon, is a section for market data. Generally, firms will also have a business plan, which is the “first year implementation” of the strategy. The business plan has a section for Market Analysis. And then, the marketing plan has more detailed analysis of the market data and the detailed actions to realize the marketing strategy. Examples of a strategic process, strategic plan, business plan, and marketing plan, with questions answered by each can be seen:

https://users.zoominternet.net/~bsolutions/index.htm

Again, this is in a perfect world where your firm has implemented a similar process and has all of the written plans and regular reviews. From your question, it sounds like you were given an assignment to fix something that has grown ad hoc.

What I would recommend doing is to start by making an outline of a plan – similar to what is presented at the link above for strategic plan, business plan, and marketing plan. Then, from what’s available within your firm and by talking with people, write down all the information documenting each section in the outline. Where there is missing information, this becomes areas of “misalignment.” Review the plans for disconnects. You will probably see disconnects between the business and strategic plan and then between the marketing and business plan. These disconnects will take two forms (using the business plan and marketing plan as an example):

1) Marketing actions identified in the business plan not
covered in the marketing plan
For these, to drive alignment, add appropriate
actions to the marketing plan to close the gap
2) Actions in the marketing plan not in agreement with
goals in the business plan
For these gaps, review the goals and either:
a) Eliminate the actions in the marketing plan
because they are not part of the company
strategy, or
b) Add a goal to the business plan to cover the
need the marketing plan action is addressing

For a simplistic measure of “alignment,” you can count business plan goals versus marketing plan actions which cover those goals. But, as Chris B implied, this is a bit of a “feel good” thing, given that this is an all-or-nothing deal; your marketing plan either addresses the needs of the business plan or it doesn’t. Partially credit in business is still failure. This is more of a prescription for determining the mismatch between the strategies and a way to fix that versus a measurement method, which I believe addresses the issue more fully.