With that in mind, here are 5 questions you can ask yourself to evaluate your marketing strategy:

1. Do you know who you are targeting?

Even if you subscribe to Byron Sharp’s model for How Brands Grow, when he says brands should seek to identify the largest possible audience for growth, you still need some understanding of who is and who isn’t in the market. And if, for reasons of resources, or product range, or short versus long term gain, you are targeting discrete groups in your market, then you need to demonstrate a way of articulating the key consumer groups in your market.

The key here is understanding your audience. It’s not enough for you to identify groups or segments of consumers by attributes such as age, gender, income or household size – they can be useful markers, but they rarely say little about how people actually behave in a buying situation.

By understanding, we mean that your marketing strategy should articulate what needs, behaviours and triggers people exhibit when they come into your market. That you’ve identified real people and that you understand the dynamics at play. It’s also important to be able to show your working out – that your consumer segmentation and targeting tracks back to real insight rather than your best guess.

2. Have you articulated what you want the brand or business to stand for?

It takes some getting your head round, but a brand only exists in the mind of your consumers. When we think of a brand, particularly a well-known one, we assign it a meaning which is greater than the sum of its parts.  And what we each think of a brand is relative – it’s relative to awareness (it’s hard to attribute meaning to a brand you’ve never heard of), it’s relative to competitors and it’s relative to the buying situation.

There’s no right or wrong way to articulate what your brand or business stands for – vision statement, brand DNA, purpose or brand statement, mission, and so on – but you can stress-test your articulation. It should be:

• Simple and easily understood – no complicated brand pyramids or wheels
• Meaningful – it doesn’t need to be sexy, but it does need to be distinctive, so generic words like ‘quality’, ‘sustainable’ or ‘innovative’ are rarely helpful
• Known throughout the organisation – or if you’re in a multi-brand business, at least by all the people who work on your brand, from the factory floor to the customer service phone line
• Enduring – the biggest and best brands in the world haven’t changed what they stand for over decades

Looping back round to the first question, in articulating what you stand for, it’s also vital that you’ve identified how you fulfil a real consumer need (sometimes called a positioning statement).

3. Is your marketing 4Ps framework consistent with your strategy?

The 4Ps are the main marketing levers that any business has in order to execute its marketing strategy. There are plenty of people who will say that there are 5 or even 7 Ps, but if your product (which includes service), promotions (which includes comms and messaging), pricing (which includes price reductions and offers related to price) and place (including distribution and channels) are consistent and all pulling in the same direction, it will make for a smoother route to strategic success.

"Articulate what your brand stands for and ensure your marketing 4Ps framework is consistent and pulling in the same direction"

4. Can you demonstrate how implementing the strategy creates value?

In other words, if you implement your strategy well, will the results be favourable for the business? Of course, this depends very much on what the business wants to achieve.

For many, the strategic aim will be to grow shareholder value and the marketing strategy needs to demonstrate how it will do that. Your marketing strategy should be able to demonstrate how it will have moved the brand / business from where you are now to where you want to be.

We appreciate that marketing activity measurement is a tricky subject. Return on investment is only part of the picture since much of what you will be investing in is creating greater awareness and brand saliency (ensuring that your brand comes to mind in a buying situation). In the same way that standard accounting processes find it difficult to value the brand they aren't always geared up to measure marketing success, but that isn’t to say it can’t be done.

One of the simplest tracking tools you can put in place is the annual brand survey. Understand how your brand is tracking vs. your competitors for awareness, consideration and purchase.

5. Are you all agreed on the strategic priorities?

It seems like such a low barrier to fall at, but all too often, businesses fail in implementing their marketing strategies because the management team doesn’t agree on the strategic priorities and tries to do everything at once. It’s a bit like trying to win a game of chess on the first move or expecting to be able to move all your pieces at once!

It’s highly unlikely that you will be working with unlimited resources, nor is it likely that you will be able to implement your plan without investment. So, given that, you need to agree on the priorities – this first, then that – and on the risks and investment needed to achieve it.

In prioritising, you will need to have an eye for the long and the short – if you always prioritise the short, you will never get to the long (always activating at a campaign or product level) or vice versa which means that whilst you’re busy brand-building over the long term, the coffers are running dry because there’s no short-term activation.

Neither is prioritisation about ‘this’ or ‘that’. It’s about the power of ‘and’, ‘when’, and ‘then’. The strategy of strategy if you like!

"Too often marketing strategies fail because management teams don't agree on the strategic priorities."