It's a cycle of planning, regrouping and amendments which result in that precious document often simply and surreptitiously called "The Plan".
However, in this excitement of forecasting and planning, where are your customers? More importantly, what does your customer experience look like three, five, and ten years from now?
What will your brand's touch points with customers be in the future? Brands tend to forecast how to get more customers through the door but often cannot say what will keep them coming back - how they will access your brand, how will you make their lives better. As much as marketing or an innovation department may come up with the perfect brand experience, being operationally poor in execution will find that Cannes Lion winning experience in the place where PowerPoint presentations go to die.
Flexible and adaptable brands find it easier to remain relevant, but without crafting the future brand experience in line with "The Plan", then the customer's experience will always be reactive and take time to truly be strategic or yield any value. HOW the customer experiences your brand has to evolve with the rest of the business. It's that simple.
Some may argue that technology changes continually and much of the customer experience is dictated by its fluidity. I dare to venture that a business which is structured to be flexible is able to handle and optimally adjust to just about anything - including holographic salespeople or whatever else technology has in store for us. And this nimble structure doesn't happen by chance: it is a deliberate decision and effort by an organisation to always look to improve.
So as a brand manager, consultant, sales or operations person - whoever you are, begin to think about where a customer sees you, hears you. What happens when they reach the point of purchase, what happens when they leave?
This is really a time portal seeing your customers in situ five years from now. Today, you should be able to answer the: what, where, when and most importantly how of that 2018 customer's 360 experience of your brand.
