You Can Plan All You Want...

It's always good to plan ahead, prepare for the next campaign, activity, or project, and try to get your ducks in a row...

...but we know it won't end up as planned. It never does.

That certain promotion didn't hit the way we thought. That last-minute, thrown-together ad campaign turned out wildly successful. And we can't explain the logic behind either.

That's the life of marketing. Ain't it grand?

But while we can't explain it, we can learn from it: realize again and again why flexibility is key, and why we need to get started fast and then get better.

At the end of the day, we're trying to achieve a certain goal. Either we hit it or we didn't, and we adjust accordingly: rinse and repeat, or shake off the loss and try again.

We study what happened, ask questions, speak to our users, and research to learn new things, find out more about our audience, understand what worked and why, and implement our findings in the next activity...or not.

So don't stop planning. Just don't expect it to pan out the way you planned.

...because it won't :)