Strategic Planning Important to Communicators

by lisa ~ April 23, 2009

Strategic planning is just as important in the public relations and marketing functions of a business as it is in the finance or manufacturing areas. It’s easy to dash from one crisis to another and ignore the big picture. But it’s important for the company that someone in the communications department is thinking about long-term ways to enhance the corporate reputation and build brand equity.

Consulting firm McKinsey surveyed businesses about their strategic planning efforts this year. It’s not surprising that companies are approaching the annual process quite differently. “Gone are the days of linear trend-extrapolation exercises that produce base, upside, and downside cases,” wrote the authors. “Strategists, now facing the most profoundly uncertain times in their careers, are creating disaster scenarios that would have been unthinkable until recently.”

In fact, more than 50% of respondents said that scenario planning was either playing a bigger role this year or that it had been newly added to the process.

Welcome to my world. This element has been part of the corporate communicator’s handbook for at least as long as I’ve been in this field. Maybe PR could teach the C-suite some things about strategic planning.

McKinsey encourages companies to plan in spite of the economic uncertainty for two reasons. First, it points out that “fundamental market trends” such as the aging populations in Europe and North America and the continuing economic advancement of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) will continue to create strategic opportunities.

Second, it notes that an important part of strategic planning is evaluating the effectiveness of current approaches. “This year’s strategic-planning process is a time to encourage managers to sort out which current strategies the crisis has helped, hurt, or failed to affect and to ensure that a system and metrics are in place to track their performance,” the authors wrote.

That’s good advice for communicators too.

To read the complete article, “Strategic planning: Three tips for 2009,” click here.

Lisa Tibbitts is a New York-based corporate communications professional with an MBA in marketing. Follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FinancialPR.