Strategic Decision-Making in Marketing

As marketers, we make two types of decisions — tactical decisions and strategic decisions. A simple distinction: tactical decisions seek to maximize results in the immediate term or solve the challenge of the day, while strategic decisions seek to maximize long term gains, engage a whole new audience, or fundamentally change the marketing landscape. What does this mean in practice?

One prime example is Coca Cola. Several decades ago, Coca Cola introduced a holiday commercial with a catchy jingle. Was Coca Cola’s cute ad intended to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony? No. Their tactic: create an ad that will capitalize on the feel-good holiday season and break through the market clutter. This they achieved. But they were also keenly aware of their strategic goal: to create a generation of consumers which associates drinking Coca Cola with happiness. They were savvy enough to understand that a holiday message is part of a greater campaign, and to check that the two operated in support of each other. Just imagine the feeling of running down a hillside with hundreds of happy, smiling people and singing in perfect harmony! Just like drinking a Coke, no? Their tactical and strategic ad is an enduring example of effective corporate marketing.

What happens when a strategic approach goes awry? When Nissan decided to bring a luxury marque to the US market, they hired Hill, Holiday, Connors, Cosmopolos to create a groundbreaking and memorable campaign designed to both whet the consumer appetite and build mystique around their brand. The “Rocks and Trees” campaign tried to portray their new cars as the culmination of a Japanese duality — design coupled with exquisite engineering. Where other car makers proudly displayed photos of their automobiles, Infiniti featured nature shots: a lone tree in the middle of a field; a collection of smooth stones in a shallow brook.; fall foliage on a hillside. As a result, people were left asking, “but what does the car actually look like?” Honda and Toyota, with their traditional campaigns, reached consumers with the appropriate visual message, “imagine yourself in a car that looks like this.” Infiniti? People had no idea what the cars looked like. And very few rocks and trees were sold.

Strategic decision-making is not only relevant on image campaigns. Often what is perceived as simply a tactical approach has long term, strategic consequences.

Let’s talk about Macy’s. Macy’s is constantly advertising their sales. One week it’s shoes, the next week, menswear, followed by the Winter White sale. The original intent was to bring people into the stores, and by targeting different consumers they had hoped to bring groups of people into the stores at designed intervals. Thus, these ads are tactical, geared toward short-term gains. However, people have become so accustomed to Macy’s sales that on days where no sale is running, traffic and profits drop dramatically. Macy’s has had so many sales that they’ve unintentionally changed how people perceive the brand. No longer the flagship store of a retail block or mall, they’ve become more of a high-end discounter. In this instance, a tactical solution had long-term strategic consequences.

Coca Cola, Infiniti and Macy's had the same basic tactical goal, but the solutions they chose had vastly different results on their long-term strategy. Each tactical solution we create has an impact on the strategic, and constant assessment of the strategic is critical if we don’t want to repeat the lessons learned by Infiniti.