Good Strategy, Poor Execution; Poor Strategy, Good Execution

In marketing, it would be an understatement to say that planning is everything. Within marketing planning, the development of objectives is instrumental to what decisions, and courses of action, are dictated later on. Indeed, without objectives the marketer is faced with no guidelines; there is no focus to the message they will be delivering to consumers.

With regards to strategy in marketing plans, the marketing mix is taken into consideration. The marketing mix, of course, consists of product, price, distribution, and marketing communications. One (or more) of these variables in the marketing mix will have more weighting to them, depending on the direction strategic thinking is headed.

Strategy or execution? Make your move.

So the question now arises, which is the better situation to be in: having good strategy and poor execution, or poor strategy and good execution? My own personal view on the matter, is that it is largely situational (much like most things within marketing). Normally, you would think having strong execution would trump all else, but what if consumers remembered your ad only for the deal offered and not the message (which was the main goal of your company)?

Many marketing messages have passed by consumers, discarded and forgotten just as soon as they arrived in whatever media they were applied to, mainly due to a particular appeal technique having more influence then the underlying message. This situation is common within humourous ads that are thought up by marketers, since execution is always strong with this type of marketing (there is high recall).

If I could give one scenario, in which having a poor strategy and good execution is valid, it would be incentive-based strategies. While not always successful, strategies based solely on incentives tend to create an impact with consumers because the message and execution are both simple. In particular, execution is so simple with incentives because there is significant potential to create excitement amongst consumers.

I emphasized "solely on incentives" because I wish to clarify that what I am saying should not be confused with always using incentives to obtain customers, since it eliminates the elements of strategy, and it runs a huge risk of decreasing the value proposition of your company's products/services. The exception being if you are in a highly competitive industry, where price is the entire focus for maintaining, or increasing market share (e.g. automotive, cellular industries).

When thinking of strategy and tactics, make sure to do all the grunt work first, such as a situational analysis, competitive analysis, consumer analysis, etc. Assess strategies and tactics, in terms of which is less important to the success of the communications being planned for, as well as the alignment of the company's future relationship with its customers.