Determining your marketing plan’s scope

You can write a marketing plan for one specific product or service, a collection of products or services, or for the company’s entire family of products and services. You should decide this before you start the planning work because how you decide has a dramatic impact on how you go about marketing. So how do you decide? Well you don’t. The customer decides this for you. It depends on how customers understand your brands from the outside looking in. They know you through your brand architecture. How your brands are organized. For example, a branded house is a single brand under which all your products and services are marketed. It’s sometimes called an umbrella brand. So companies like Chase, BMW, or LinkedIn are considered umbrella brands. At the other end of the spectrum is a house of brands such as Proctor and Gamble and Unilever with many well-known individual brands. Now in the middle are hybrids. The endorser brands like Marriott use the good Marriott name to endorse individual hotel brand names like Courtyard and Fairfield Inn. So here’s the key. You decide on the scope of your marketing plan depending on your brand architecture. You write marketing plans around each brand given where they are structured in the overall architecture. So for example, if each brand exists in a house of brands structure then each individual brand gets their own marketing plan. Hey, you’ve heard the old saying. The customer is always right. Well, when deciding on what level to write your plan, take their advice, and write the plan around how they understand you and your family of brands.