CMOs, you won’t make it through the harsh economic conditions coming in 2020 if you can’t adjust your planning approach to respond to changing customer needs and operational availability. You’ve known shifting to people-led planning was a good idea for years. Read the new research I just published with my colleague Stephanie Liu to learn how to do this, fast.

We introduce a three-part approach to adopting people-led planning.

  • First, empower people to work in a responsive way. For many companies, an iterative, continuous way of managing tasks is counter to their established culture and process. People are goaled on accomplishing an end result, not on working in a continuous way that allows for learning and step-by-step improvement. So, the foundation of people-led planning is about priming your team to accept methods that are less rigid.
  • Build off of a more flexible mindset with new processes. Once you have a growth mindset established in your culture, slowly incorporate more regular data inputs into marketing plans. The principles of Agile development provide a useful way to think about how to adjust your planning process without overengineering the change. See this diagram for an explanation.
  • Take some immediate steps to inject flexibility into the current process. Even while you’re working to transition to a more comprehensive people-led planning process, you can negotiate for better terms with media partners, repurpose existing content assets, and tap your CI colleagues for a more continuous drip of quantitative and qualitative customer insights.

Check out the full report for a complete guide on pivoting to people-led planning and to learn from some examples of companies that can sense and respond successfully.