Like Christmas, Brand Planning comes around once a year...but is rarely welcomed with the same level of enthusiasm as the Agency Party.

In my experience it usually involves taking last year's plan from the dusty shelf around September, changing the dates, adjusting the numbers and trying to getting it past your boss whilst he's distracted.

However, great planning is a essential step in growing brands and need not be so painful. Here's a few basic principles.

1 Look at the Big Picture

This is the first thing you should do before you dive into your Plan. It involves stepping back and taking a long hard at how well your brand is doing. Examine your brand in microscopic detail, but equally look at how it sits in the broader category context.

Look at the here and now, but equally important look forward and take a point of view on the key trends that are going to impact on your market. There's usually plenty of data and information freely available (the internet is an amazing tool) but you just have to take the time to look for it.

2 Get Clarity on Your Brand Vision

Before you dive into the Plan you need clarity on
- your brand proposition / brand positioning
- your brand's role in the Company's portolio
- your target audience / needstate
- the key consumer insight that underpins your brand

If there's fuzziness at this level then it will translate into a muddled plan

3 Clarity Objectives

As a start point get clarity on

- your business objectives. These are internal measures of success. They're usually financial, profit, volume, etc
- your marketing objectives These are the changes in your target consumers' attitude and behaviour required over the course of the plan to hit your business objectives.

Consumer Attitude Objectives include: awareness, image perception, desirability, etc
Consumer Behaviour Objectives include: trial, repeat purchase levels, retention/loyalty levels

Key things to watch out for
- don't confuse business and marketing objectives
- ensure they all adhere to SMART principles (which I'm sure everyone knows): easy to say, difficult to achieve
- make sure you can genuinely measure and track your objectives, otherwise you're relying on assumption and guesswork

4 Show Linkages

Everything in a plan needs to connect together from objectives through to marketing activities. Synergy and integration are the words marketers like to use. ‘Joined up thinking' is the phrase favoured by politicians

Some people use the 6 Ps, some use 7 Ps to articulate marketing strategy and activities, but I've still a fan of the original Philip Kotler 4 Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion). Everything fits into these 4 boxes and I think that the other Ps make life too complicated.

5 Keep it Focused

Many plans try to do too much, often too quickly with too little budget. Rather than moan about having no money to spend, it's much better to do 2 or 3 things really, really well over the course of a Plan than to spread your resources too thinly.

6 Keep it Short and Simple

Try to avoid marketing jargon wherever possible. It's not big and it's not clever. People don't understand what you're taking about .It only serves to confirm what they've always thought of marketing people.

You should be able to pin down the essentials of a Marketing Plan onto a couple of pages. It ensures your thinking is sharp, you can discuss it over a desk and carry it around with you. Writing a short plan is much harder than writing a long one, but is worth it.

7 Engage Others

Although the Plan is developed by the marketing team, it should be owned by everyone. You can engage others in lots of ways:
- use their expertise to help input to the plan: salesmen, market researchers, r&d people are all particularly helpful - they're usually very smart and are good at keeping you grounded
- share the plan with the whole organisation

Brand planning days are good, as long as they're well facilitated (give me a call) and the egos of the agency teams are kept in check.

8 What Gets Measured Gets Done

The favourite saying of my old boss. Selecting and monitoring KPIs (key performance indicators) isn't particularly exciting, but is a great way to keep you focused and on track. In choosing KPIs, ensure
- you measure marketing activities
- you measure both inputs (eg number of supermarket listings) and outputs (eg average rate of sale)
If you can summarise all your KPIs on one page - often called a Dashboard - then they're easy to track and diagnose

9 Combine Creativity and Rigour

The best plans include both - creativity in terms of innovation, communication, packaging etc and rigour in terms of analysis and strategic thinking. Both are equally important. There shouldn't be a trade off between the two