Strategies or Tactics

A lot of military and political pundits have recently criticized President Bush's "surge" in Iraq as not being a new strategy, but merely a tactic. A strategy is a plan for achieving end goals. Tactics are the details that execute the plan.

Execution is important. But tactics don't matter much if the strategy is flawed or doesn't achieve worthwhile goals.

Are your marketing efforts heavy on tactics and light on strategy? If your company is like most organizations, then chances are you are wasting a lot of time and effort on tactics and paying short shrift to strategy.

Instead of asking tactical questions such as:

Who is going to write the next white paper?
Who is going to man the booth at the next trade show?
Who is going to design our web site?
Who is going to design our brochure?

You should first be asking strategic questions such as:

What types of people will buy our product?
How is our product different from our competitors' products?
What are our customers most pressing problems that our product can solve?
What are the key themes that all of our marketing campaigns should stress?

Has your company authoritatively answered these strategic questions? Has it even asked them?

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