The natural world is very good at adapting. For more than 3 billion years, living things have used complex tactics to adapt to changes in the earth’s environment. The yearly marketing plan doesn’t have as much of a good name. It’s something that most people dread doing. But marketing can make better plans if they look at how nature deals with change.
“Oh, nice!” There was never a marketer who said, “It’s planning and budgeting season.” It would be easy to make plans if we knew for sure what would happen. VUCA stands for volatile, uncertain, complicated, and ambiguous. Such words describe markets. An yearly marketing plan is always out of date when it comes out, no matter how much work goes into making it.
Uncertainty about what will happen next adds to the stress that groups feel as they try to make plans. Internal political arguments, worries about funding, competing interests, shifting goals, and worries about big changes like AI can all cause problems. Still, planning is important for coordination and to move the enterprise mission forward.
How nature deals with change can teach us
Stewart Brand is an American author, editor, and businessman who wrote the book “The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility.” In it, he talks about how communities in nature deal with change by adapting at different rates. Based on the work of scientist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, Brand talks about a model with different levels of speed. Some parts change quickly (called “fast learns”), while others change slowly (called “slow remembers”).
Keeping different time scales in balance makes things more resilient. In a conifer forest, for example, each tree’s pine leaves change every year, but the tree crown grows over a number of years. Over thousands of years, the forest environment changes as a whole. This development at different speeds helps the system do well by handling stresses like weather and parasites.
Pace layers can be used in marketing by changing the speeds to fit different parts of the plan. For legal reasons, some parts of the marketing plan have to follow the main yearly rhythm of the financial calendar. However, this pattern doesn’t always work. Everything doesn’t have to be forced into yearly rounds; this is just common practice, and some companies are questioning this idea.
Layering the marketing plan at a fast pace
Brand’s six-layered model uses the way things work in nature to make a broad suggestion for a healthy society. Businesses probably won’t have such a big goal, but marketing still needs to use layered thought. The important thing is to figure out how fast each project needs to change.
Make plans often for things that change a lot.
Brand calls fashion “the top layer of the model.” Its job is to be quick and interesting. “Try this!” “No, no, try this!” Everything that is meant to be customer-responsive needs to be able to adapt quickly to how customers act. Digital marketing, creative execution, content, and sales plays are all things that change a lot.
Brand says that activities at this top level should be able to try new things in any way that society allows. Continuous adaptation helps people respond more accurately to what’s going on, learn more, come up with new ideas, and be better prepared to take advantage of new possibilities.
The biggest “aha!” moment in a pace-layered marketing plan might be agreeing to check in on some parts of the plan and funds more often. If agile teams have taken the habit of “planning at the last responsible moment,” they will be ahead of the game. If not, it might take a while for a group to get used to a very flexible system where some spending items are rented for three months instead of being set in stone a year ahead of time.
There shouldn’t be any surprises here for this to work. There are a lot of checkpoints, data sharing, and dialogue boxes to help. In this level of planning, teams that are closest to customers should be given more power because they know what’s going on and can adapt to changes more quickly.
Every year or every other year, you should update the marketing budget and big projects as a whole.
The second part of Brand’s model is commerce, which we all know to be economic pursuits. The energy of business comes from new ideas and learning that come from the top layer. Commerce’s job is to give resources to all the layers below and above it. The funds are still being added to the general marketing budget by the annual plan.
The best time to do things like creating enablement packages to support the top layer’s customer actions, communicating goals, setting KPIs, and making the content and editorial calendars is once a year, with a half-yearly update. Every year, big events, ads, and sales plans are also set in motion. This layer has the workstreams that marketing does for projects that last more than one year.
Multi-year projects
The next three parts of Brand’s plan are culture, governance, and infrastructure. There have been big changes here that will send businesses in big new ways. These layers don’t change quickly, even if the plan says they should. They change more slowly than the fast pace of fashion/customer programs or the constant march of business.
Businesses may find this pace too slow, especially the part about people. But for some jobs, they do better when they go more slowly. The layers that help us remember are infrastructure, governance, and society. A higher level of stability gives the system shape, coherence, and direction.
A slower pace would be better for everyone who has worked for a business that reorganizes every year (culture), tries to rip and replace the tech stack all the time (infrastructure), or changes the sales compensation plan every year (governance).
For projects in these levels, a careful replanning every three to five years works. The steps needed to carry out the plan can be broken down into investment and workstream processes that last six months or three months and are reviewed and changed on a regular basis. Some projects for these longer layers are:
- Plan for your brand.
- Adding important new tools.
- Getting ready to serve new groups of “buyers and hires”
- Making changes to account for new rules and social trends.
Nature on top of itself
Nature is the bottom layer, the longest layer, and the strongest layer in Brand’s model. In the past, businesses might not have thought about nature when they made plans. But now we all know that nature has the most significant effect.
When making plans, businesses should think about how the natural layer will affect those plans in order to get the best health for the business, society, and the land itself.
Getting ahead with multi-layered marketing plans
Some of the things that helped marketing leaders who started a pace-layered planning journey be successful were shared with me. Strong business leaders who think about marketing, the company, and the market as a whole need to have a lot of two-way talks.
It’s okay to be a little selfish at times. You want leaders who are really interested in what they do, so be ready for some good disagreements between the different levels’ needs. It’s good for a society to be good at handling conflict.
All layers must be successful at the same time for the system to stay in good health. No layer, not even business, should be in charge. A reasonable budget and staffing level are helpful for the company to reasonably reach its goals.
“Time is the enemy of the average company and the friend of the great one,” Warren Buffett once said. Businesses are encouraged to think about how time and the job of marketing work together by pace stacking. They are a strong force when they work together.
