Ditch the Annual Marketing Plan
To put it bluntly, this is also true: ‘Long-term planning is planning to fail.’
Here’s why.
The pace of change is constantly accelerating
Long-term plans work when they’re made in a context that’s well-understood and relatively unchanging. The modern world is nothing like that.
The market changes that we’re seeing as repercussions from COVID are only the continuation of what’s been happening for decades.
Moore’s Law states that the speed and capability of computers can be expected to double every two years, thanks to the increasing number of transistors that a microchip can contain. It’s held for over 50 years – and, while some believe its demise to be imminent, leaders at chip manufacturing companies remain optimistic that it will hold for the foreseeable future. Intel’s head of silicon engineering predicts we’ll see chips with 2 trillion transistors by 2020.
As you know if you’ve lived on earth this decade, the constant increase in computing power inevitably drives life-altering innovations. Smartphones feel inseparable from the human condition, but they’ve only been around for 14 years. VR and AR are only in their nascent phases. Big data sounds boring by now, but still, according to IBM, 90% of all of the data in the world has been created in the past two years.
I can continue to list off emerging technologies, but you get the point. The world is changing. And the rate of change is only increasing.
You can’t know everything
Given everything I’ve just listed – plus COVID, plus politics, plus everything else – it’s next to impossible to keep track of what markets are doing now. It is literally impossible to know what’s coming next.
For proof, consider that the biggest companies in the world, with huge teams dedicated to customer and market research, still rush headlong to sell bad products to dead end markets.
Remember Google Glass? Remember Microsoft Zune? Remember Facebooklite? Based on what these companies knew when these products launched, each was a good decision.
Clearly, they didn’t know everything.
Neither do you.
