Tag Archives: decision making

Towards The CMO’s Playbook – A reflection on teaching and learning marketing strategy

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Two months ago, forty-seven eager young minds started on a quest for “the CMO’s playbook” – a journey to understand strategic decision making in marketing. An equally eager but not so young mind (yours truly) joined them, mainly to prove that fun and learning can go together. It was a tall ask from all of us, but we managed to pull it off!

Finally, it was the student teams that prepared their original playbooks for CMOs, and I might have merely orchestrated the journey – a journey through a mix of simulation, business cases, discussions of real life marketing, and minimal reliance on pre-cooked frameworks.

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Thriving in Ambiguity

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Data is indispensable to most decision-making. The large market share that a company commands could mean 15% or 75%, and it is important to know that when deciding which markets to focus on. The short-term interest rate might be 2.25% higher than that on long term debt. However, there comes a point when either additional data is not available or additional analysis is not helpful. At that point, knowing there is ambiguity and still progressing becomes critical.

I have a hunch that Samsung, at some point, took a call – despite the absence of perfect data – to invest in technology and in building the brand; and that has been paying off handsomely now. Neither data nor analysis could have provided the confidence necessary to take that decision.

Often, an estimate is all one gets to work with.