In Marketing Geek: Marketing Calendar 2007? blogger Michael Fassnacht makes some excellent points about the limitations of the annual ad marketing planning process that goes on in many organizations.

As someone who has been more used to the opposite approach, but has worked with conpanies who treat the calendar as a sacred cow, I agree that the calendar-based planning process is rather limiting given today's customer conversations and the need to react quickly to changing conditions and opportunities.

On the post, I made several comments about how a more customer-centric process could be integrated into the annual plan in a gradual way that is less threatening to existing cultures than simply throwing out the familiar process.

Thinking about why we have processes in place can help us identify who the stakeholders are in the processes in question. Ad agencies and publishers obviously like the idea of nailing down a huge ad buy before the new year (and in some cases before the holiday sales season changes expectations about what to spend.) Marketing departments like to be able to plan work efficiently. The question is, does this approach serve the client by serving the needs of the client's ultimate customers with timely and relevant IMC communications?

I do think there is value in calendars if used as planning rather than contract negotiation tools for ad buys. MarketingExperiments.com has a super approach to maximizing customer relevance (and thus in most cases, sales and profits) on its Marketing Blueprints page. Be sure and check out the Merchandising Calendar PDF.

Happy planning!