The Right & Wrong Way to Write a Brand Plan – Brand Management 111
Current paradigms must be continuously challenged by the emerging marketing models. If you continue to use the marketing models of the past, you will be dinosaured or become irrelevant.
Here are a few tips on the way to write a brand plan for 2026-27 and avoid the wrong ways as a forward-looking brand manager.
1. The right way to write a brand plan is to first scribble it with pencil on paper, and then later in a word file.
2. The wrong way to write a brand plan is to write it on a PowerPoint straight away. Do not become a slave of PowerPoint. PowerPoint inhibits the thinking process.
1. The right way to write the situation analysis is to ask (a) Where am I today? (b) Why am I here today? (c) Why do I want to go where I intend to go? The (b) is very, very, important.
2. The wrong way, an act of omission, is to ignore steps (b) and (c)
1. The right way is to do a SWOT-AP Analysis of my brand and SWOT-AP Analysis of at least three brands whom I perceive as competitors. One of course should include the leader brand in the category.
2. The wrong way is merely to do a SWOT Analysis of my brand and SWOT Analysis of competitor.
1. The right way to start a brand plan is to write the vision of your brand stating your ‘WHY’, by stimulating your limbic system
2. The wrong way is not stating your ‘WHY’ and using just your neo-cortex.
1. The right way to write a brand plan is to spend a lot of time on the STP.
2. The wrong way is to just have a cursory look at the STP.
1. The right way to write a brand plan is to incorporate the patient-centric model of marketing, using insights from patients as the fulcrum.
2. The wrong way is using the 1974 model or the later Transactional Marketing Model.
- The right way to write a brand plan is to think beyond numbers, Numbers bind your thinking process.
- The wrong way is to get bounded by numbers and like the frog, think my well is the whole world and stay within these numbers.
- The right way to write a brand plan is to bury the market-share mindset somewhere deep inside the Indian Ocean. Swim in the Deep Blue Indian Ocean – imagine that vast ocean is your market.
- The wrong way is to persist with the 1974 market-share mindset and fight in the red ocean. The market-share mentality will make the red ocean deep, deep, deeeeeeeeeep red.
- The right way is to generate insights, think critically and then start.
- The wrong way is to write a brand plan by filling up templates given by someone, which inhibits your original thinking, Writing a brand plan is not a template-filling exercise.
For more guidance, please contact Shailaja Pathak Dwivedi or Vivek Hattangadi