I usually try not to mix sports and marketing but I’ve just finished reading “Bo’s Lasting Lessons” by legendary coach Bo Schembechler and John Bacon. He made one point in the book that made me realize why marketing is difficult and coaching is easy. He was discussing the strategy behind the team’s practice sessions and said the reason they practiced so hard was because they only had 25 seconds to get ready for the next play.

That’s when it dawned on me that a football team has it easy because we marketers only have 8 seconds to capture the attention of a consumer before we lose her. We may only have a four to six word headline to capture a reader’s interest. Marketers don’t have a play clock or referees that blow their whistles. Our marketing play clock never stops. It’s constantly on and your customers are not going to waste any time trying to understand your message.

While football teams practice all week and lay out game plans in the “off season,” we marketers don’t have that luxury. Our game is every day. We have to execute a game plan every day. We don’t have the luxury of reviewing films Sunday afternoon and then getting ready for a game that’s a week away. Later this day, each of you will be doing something to help your business and you’ll do it again tomorrow and the next day.

Another luxury football teams have is the opportunity to study their opponents on film. A team has a pretty good idea what their opponent’s game plan is going to be. Marketers compete on a multi-level playing field. We face competitive products and/or services. We face challenges from within our own distribution channels, internal challenges like production shortages or poor scheduling, external challenges like the government and the greatest challenge of all – a dynamic, changing consumer base. And often many of these challenges come all at once with little warning.

The Marketing Implications

Even in the good times, we have to continually prepare. I don’t mean preparing for the bad times, but preparing for the next stage of growth. Our Sixth Star strategy relies on preparation, and the source of all our marketing information begins when you capture demographic, transactional and behavioral information about your customers and model that information for the sole purpose of engaging them to buy your product

Having a knowledge base of information allows every marketer to accomplish three critical marketing goals:

1. To identify the best customers and keep them happy and buying.
   
   
2. To identify marginal customers and create a campaign to get them to buy more. What you say to them and how you say it can have a significant impact on the brand’s organic growth.
   
   
3. To identify potential users or buyers and create targeted messages based on what is already known about current customers

Today’s AH-ha! is centered on the basics of marketing. In football jargon, it’s all about the two “P”s; PLANNING and PRACTICE. Too many marketers are so busy grasping for the next channel to reach consumers that they miss the part about getting the basics right. In his book, Bo said he’d take execution over innovation every time because if you don’t execute, you don’t win games. The same is true in marketing.

Is it any wonder that a recent CMO Council survey highlighted in a research brief from the Center for Media Research reported significant agency turnover in 2007? The key reasons these Chief Marketing Officers cited were:

• Lack of innovation
  
• No value-added thinking
  
• Poor creative
  
• Quality of work
  
• Results and deliverability

• Marketing and customer analytics
  
• Strategic planning and business development
  
• Product marketing Database marketing
  
• Vertical market experience
  
• Customer intelligence

And after eight seconds, the marketing engine has to be fine-tuned to keep our marketing play alive because, just like football, we have to score sales and repeat sales. Think of every sale as another FIRST DOWN. Just like a football team has to get another “first down”, marketers have to get another sale, hopefully with a cross-sell or upsell to sustain the drive.

This week, take stock of your team’s key competencies as outlined above. As Bo said many times, “It’s the team, the team, the team.”

Have a great week.