When to Develop a Marketing Plan

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When I tell people I teach a course on marketing the data warehouse, they often laugh and say, 'What's to teach? Marketing means just say yes.' Ever the gullible consumer, I respond with, 'That's selling!' Perhaps it's a minor distinction. The essence of marketing is understanding what users want and developing what they want. This sounds like the mantra of many IT organizations who want to be more aligned with the business. A marketing plan can give you the techniques to better accomplish this dialog and level of understanding. At a minimum, a marketing plan will help you develop a communication strategy and manage user expectations.

Therefore, you want to draft a market plan early in the project, often before project funding. A marketing plan will help you articulate what you intend to deliver and why. As discussed under 'Product' in this chapter, a marketing approach ensures you get used to describing what you deliver in terms of the benefits, not the features. This difference in emphasis makes the funding and implementation process easier. What would your project sponsors rather invest in:

• Feature A three-tier BI tool

• Benefit A BI tool that will help improve profitability

As you develop the data sources and universes, and as you architect the BusinessObjects deployment, update the marketing plan to reflect changes in functionality. As you work with users to define requirements and preview the universe/reports/ training materials, gauge which elements of the plan are effective.

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