We are a mere ten days before Christmas Eve, do you have your summer marketing plans ready to go? Whoa! Wait a minute! We are still listening to Nat King Cole singing "Merry Christmas to You” and you are talking about marketing in June, July and August?

If you are in charge of marketing for your business, your marketing plans should work at least six months ahead. Why that far in advance? For one, there is a lot to marketing and planning ahead helps keep you organized. But the larger reason is it keeps you from marketing on a whim. This is when someone comes up with a "brilliant” marketing idea, typically in the middle of a meeting where the boss is present (many times the "idea” comes from the boss) and seems to gain instant acceptance from management. There is a push to get this "can’t miss” idea in front of customers immediately. What is the problem with this kind of whimsical marketing? It involves a top-down approach to marketing. In other words, the seller tells the buyer what they like and the buyer wholeheartedly agrees with the seller and buys, buys, buys! Most of the time, the market does not respond that way. Consumers respond when their wants and needs are taken into account and your products are marketed as a solution. In order to make this bottom-up form of marketing work, you have to make sure you have defined a target market and you understand the needs of the consumers in that market. In other words, the buyer tells the seller what they want or where they are experiencing problems and the seller figures out how their products will solve those problems.

The smart marketer is not only looking at ways to communicate these solutions to the consumer, but they are also taking into account what the competition is doing to solve the same problems. Really good marketing is figuring out where the edge on the competition lies and making a big deal out of it with the consumer. Even better marketing will brand these solutions in concise and catchy words. These brands become synonymous with the solution. If you think I am joking, just think about these common problems:

• If you had a cold and you sneezed, what would you do?

• If you dropped food on your shirt and it left a stain, what would you do to eliminate the stain?

• If you wanted to watch an old movie, where would you look?

• If you wanted a Christmas gift delivered to your door, where would you shop?

Regardless of your answer to these questions, you answered the way you did because someone marketed a solution to you that involved their brand. It has become so ingrained in your thinking that you associate their brand with the answer to your wants and needs. We don’t even think about it. This is effective marketing at its best.

All of that takes time. It cannot be done effectively in haste. Marketing is always looking ahead and carrying forth the plan to be implemented on down the road. So how are your summer marketing plans coming along? It’s almost Christmas!