Vision Without Execution is Just a Hallucination
By Peter Haines
Vision statements. Mission statements. Positioning statements. Aren’t you sick and tired of being statement-ed to death? (I’m particularly ticked off over my current bank statement, but that’s for another column and a discussion with my wife). All those financial services executives coming down off the mount and telling you of their vision, the mission, the search for the Ark of the Covenant—who cares?
Well, actually, you should. Because those statements (not the search for the Ark—Indiana Jones has already been there; done that) are the “maps” your marketing efforts must follow unless you want them to be one-off, ad hoc, here-today, gone-tomorrow wisps in the air. One of the things I love about marketing is that it gets involved in all areas of a business. It has to if it’s to represent a firm as a whole. It has to understand and reflect the corporate business goals and strategies (and know its strengths and weaknesses, too).
Marketing, as all you duly-deputized marketing managers know, is a process that starts with a goal. Maybe it’s a vision statement. Maybe it’s a corporate sales goal. It doesn’t matter if you’re in financial services or underwater basket weaving. You have to articulate what you want to be when you grow up. Let’s say you have the goal. That’s great, so, how do you get there? That’s for the strategy. Pick an effective and efficient one or you’ll be wandering the Desert of Failed Campaigns. Do you use your firm’s current assets (both personnel and skill sets) or do you need to obtain new assets to achieve the goal?
Let’s say one of your strategies is to advertise your new world-wide private client banking capabilities because your firm just bought every asset manager west of Gdansk. You need a communications strategy. In that strategy, you need to be very specific about all the pieces of that communication, including:
• Your target audience (both demographically and psychographically)
• The key take-away message you want them to understand
• The key differentiators versus competition
• Executional considerations, e.g., budgets, media, timing
Once put together, you’re going to determine what tactics will bring that communication most effectively to the huddled masses you want to reach. Print, broadcast and digital media? Blogs? A slot on the Home Banking Network? These are incredibly important pieces of the puzzle because (read column’s headline here).
Let me give you a real-life, real-time example. The firm at which I work has a tremendous (and very successful, thank you very much) financial literacy program we created only for our financial planning clients and their children. We had a vision to create a comprehensive program to help our clients teach their children the value of a dollar and have the children become literate about the subject.
It is soup-to-nuts complete: strategic alliances and personal consulting calls with financial educators; age-based lesson plans; books, magazines and newspapers for both parents and children; seminars, Webinars, podcasts and events; even two kinds of piggy banks. My point is that we executed. Because we knew the program’s vision could not be achieved if we did not execute. And every time we look at the competition, we know we out-executed them.
To us, achieving financial literacy is akin to effective marketing campaigns—it’s best done by drip, drip, drip. Little digestible bites of knowledge offered regularly and relevantly, supplemented by the vitamins of expert analysis and consulting. Yummy. Our competition believes in the fire hose method. They have a vision of teaching financial literacy, too. But their idea of executing their vision is a two-to-five-day offsite series of seminars at a resort somewhere in the hardscrabble confines of an Alpine aerie. See you once a year, and we’re done.
They’re hallucinating. (Read column headline again here). Marketing gurus unite! It’s not all about the vision. Remember when Lou Gerstner first joined IBM he said the last thing IBM needed was a vision, and at that time, he was right. They were simply not executing. Later, he and his team provided a vision—a technology services-based one now copied by most of that industry.
Do not be drawn in to the siren’s song of the visionary. A wonderful TV commercial ran some years ago in which two consultants sat across from their client talking about re-mapping the supply chain, reconfiguring the customer interfaces, recalculating this and that. The client says, “Great, Let’s start.” And the consultants look at him and they say, almost in unison, “Oh, we don’t do that. We just, you know, tell you what to do..and..and…” UPS used a role model of what not to do to sell their expertise in being able to do it all.
So, go forth with vision and execute like crazy.
Thanks for listening. Stay tuned.