Marketoonist: "Brand Planning" cartoon

Weekly hand-drawn business cartoon from Marketoonist Tom Fishburne

Author

Tom Fishburne
September 30, 2024

Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

Brand Planning

Mike Tyson was asked his thoughts on Evander Holyfield’s fight plan before a WBA Heavyweight Title bout and famously responded:

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

As we shift from Q3 to Q4 this week, brand planning season is in full swing for 2025, even as final 2024 numbers come into clearer view.

The process includes a lot of horse-trading, haggling, and negotiating to choose the revenue target. The core business team develops a bottoms-up plan they feel is achievable. The leadership team sets a top-down stretch target that is much higher. Then everyone bickers over the gap between the two numbers.

A plan is outdated the moment it’s inked. Things change: customers change their mind, new opportunities surface, roadblocks appear.

But a good plan helps us respond, not react, to those changes. I like this insight from Mark Ritson a few years ago:

“Ignore the agility junkies who reject the need for any plan or demand something shorter-term. Of course, a strategy will always deviate as events unfold in unexpected ways. You need agility. But it does not replace the requirement of an initial strategy, from which to deviate in an agile manner.

“That agility will be sparked by unknown events that will occur down the track, but strategy demands an a priori approach that pre-exists and predicates the nimbleness.”

From Minnesota to Romania

Thanks to everyone at 3M who welcomed me so warmly last week in St. Paul at their Global Marketing Excellence Award Summit!

Next stop … Bucharest starts my month-long speaking tour of Europe next week. Hope to see some of you on the road!

Please let me know if you’d ever like to talk about bringing levity to any events you’re planning. And please recommend me to friends or colleagues.

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a related one from 2020, when everyone’s plans went out the window.

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.