If I see another pumpkin…
No, we’re not talking about trick or treating or the other autumnal delights that are now part of the seasonal calendar – for marketers and mere mortals. It’s the fact that January is only a few months away and all those great intentions to have your 2024 focus and campaigns sorted and ready to go at midnight on December 31st get real.
I guess we've all had that slightly scary autumn experience as we ask and are asked:
Do you know where the business is heading in 2024, 25, 26…?
What needs to be our focus? Growth, improving profitability, launching new products, consolidating, fending off the competition, buying the competition, rebranding to excite the right markets...?
Who are our priority customers and why?
Do they know who we are?
How focused and confident are the team?
Equally scarily, sometimes the default can be just to brush the cobwebs off last year’s strategy and give it a few "tweaks".... that gives me the shivers, just thinking about it.
It becomes far less daunting and a truly exciting time for innovative, positive and effective thinking if we give ourselves permission to:
Take stock, look at the insights from 2022/23
Talk to each other - internally and externally
Think strategically and creatively
Bring in external ideas and thinking to challenge our own
Create powerful objectives and build the plans, confidence, collaborations and courage to make them happen together.
I've always been immensely proud of someone saying this about us,
“Highly creative strategic partners, they do what’s best and not what’s obvious; challenge the conventional and add some magic…”
And, we can all do this, not least so we're not all chasing each other for urgent sign offs as we toast in the NewYear, falling over glass slippers on the way home!