Tips for identifying the right key issues

When you are building a strategic brand plan, it is important to take the time to do each step right. If you identify the most critical key issues, you are in a better position to identify the best strategies for your brand in the next brand planning step.

Key issues are problems negatively impacting the brand's ability to compete to its fullest ability thus preventing the brand from achieving its greatest profitability potential.

Sometimes marketers develop Critical Success Factors (CSF) instead. As the term implies, it is critical for these factors to be achieved for a brand to be successful.

Identifying key issues means that you are finding the root cause of the issue. One way to do this is to ask 'why' until you cannot answer it anymore.

Here is an example of using the 'why' questions to identify the true key issue of a situation;

i) The issue seems to be that physicians are no longer prescribing the brand. Why is this happening?

ii) It appears as though they are getting a lot of phone calls from pharmacists asking the physician to prescribe an alternative therapy, and the physicians are tired of getting these calls. Why is this happening?

iii) Patients are asking the pharmacist if there any other alternatives for them to use because the drug is not covered by major medical insurance policies? Why is this happening?

iv) Because the medical insurance companies have not yet agreed to cover the cost of the brand.

You might be able to answer 'why' to the last question, or not. However, you can see that the key issue has become clearer and clearer as we digged further.

That truly depends on your brand's situation. Typically, you would have 2-4 key issues. The brand planning team may come up with a dozen key issues. It is the facilitator's job to help the group filter the most important key issues to the top of the list. As a group, you will then decide which key issues should be maintained.

A tip to help you select the most important key issues; Think about the financial impact of that key issue. Assume that you are able to 'fix' all the key issues, how much more revenue would that bring to the brand? How much more competitive could teh brand become? How much more could the brand satisfy the patients' needs. The ones that would result in the greater revenue should filter to the top.

However, there are key issues that may be out of your control, or out of your budget to fix. Before you discard any key issues because of this, make sure that you and the brand planning team are absolutely certain that 'fixing' the key issue would be a full waste of time or financially unachievable.

For example, if your main key issue is that the brand is often out-of-stock, and the product is being manufactured at your global head quarters. You may feel that you have no options because you have no control over your global headquarter's processes. This may feel especially true if you are one of the smaller affiliates. You may want to keep the key issue anyway and brainstorm some strategy / tactical ideas in the following brand planning steps, because you never know who on your team might have a solution. The logistics representative may inform the team that global has given the right to your country affiliate to outsource some of the manufacturing.

So the message here is do not be too quick to discard key issues that may seem impossible to solve. You are working with a team of bright and resourceful people - they just might surprise you.