Lean Marketing

I'm not big on actually producing a plan, but I like a continuous planning process.

Take a look at "Dangerous" Debbie Jenkins' site - her primary links are Lean Marketing and Debbie Jenkins. Her distilled argument is that too much marketing activity is wasted. She suggests that you classify your activity into 4 main buckets:

• does it increase profit?
  
• does it decrease cost?
  
• is it mandatory for legal operation?
  
• hold and test against more detailed criteria

The point being that if it falls in the first 3 categories you should just do it anyway - the problem being for most businesses that they probably don't have much marketing activity in those categories.

She then provides a series of tools to help you classify the ideas and planned activities in the miscellany bucket so that you can more rationally decide to junk them or prioritise them.

The guts of her position is essentially free in a 10 lesson plan which Debbie will send you if you register. She also has a book "Gorillas want Bananas" which covers some of the same ground.

She may not be right for you, but she struck a chord with me.

• Marketing