Programme management
A brand is a personality - of a product, service, or organisation. Whether that personality's friendly or aloof, nurturing or aggressive, aspirational or workaday, rolls off the back of your brand values - the emotional justifiers that make people want to do business with you. Effective programme management is about delivering that value ever-clearer to an ever-better customer list over time.
First, is it delivering your brand values? There are two risks: a desire for growth may lead to off-strategy executions - discount pricing on a luxury message, or promises the brand can't keep. The other risk involves navel-gazing: managers may get so wrapped up in the brand that it becomes brittle, not developing over time. Programme management is about trends over time, not frozen snapshots.
Second, is it going the way you want it to? Your marketing programme needs to drive towards something - a new positioning, market leadership, appeal to a fresh audience, whatever. If it's simply standing still, the broader economy of competitors will race ahead of you. Programme management is about choosing a course, then making course corrections - and sometimes, course changes.
Third, is it in tune with your customers? Communicating effectively with the right blend of suspects, prospects, customers? If their beliefs about your brand are different to those it's communicating you're heading for trouble. (It's surprisingly common; look at the gap between any bank's image of itself and the image its customers have about it.) If your messages aren't resonating it's time to make a change.
If your marketing - every sentence written, every image delivered, every user experience built and used - is driven by these basics of programme management, you're doing better than 99% of marketers. Next: killer copy.