It is the second week of January in most higher education institutions in Southeast Asia. The marketing planning cycle has either just begun or is about to begin. The budget conversations are starting. The campaign calendars are being drafted. The agency reviews are being scheduled. The next recruitment cycle, in the language of every marketing leader I have worked with, is “right around the corner.”

I have been in this conversation, in some form, at six institutions over the last twenty years. I have made, in those conversations, almost every mistake available to a marketing leader. I have built plans that were internally coherent and externally irrelevant. I have allocated budgets that optimized the wrong number. I have approved campaigns that produced activity without producing belief.

The five questions below are the questions I now ask, in the first week of every planning cycle, before a single rupiah is allocated. They are not the only questions worth asking. They are, in my experience, the questions most often skipped.

Question One: Who Is the Buyer, and What Are They Buying?

I have written about this at length, in the post titled They Were Not Buying a Degree. The question is the same. The answer, in most institutions, has not changed.

The buyer is not the student. The buyer is the parent, in the great majority of international education transactions in Southeast Asia. The buyer is buying insurance, status, and an exit. The degree is the artifact. The buyer is not buying the artifact.

If the planning cycle has not yet produced a clear answer to this question — buyer, product, actual transaction — then the planning cycle is optimizing for the wrong thing. The campaigns, the budget, the calendar, the agency relationships are all, in the precise language of the situation, scaffolding for a building that is being constructed on the wrong foundation.

The first conversation of the planning cycle should be a conversation about the buyer. Not a data conversation. A conversation. With the admissions team. With the faculty. With the alumni. With the parents who have already enrolled their children. With the parents who almost enrolled their children and did not.

The conversation is the data. The data is what the planning cycle should be built on.

Question Two: What Outcome Are We Trying to Produce?

This is the question that the dashboard is not equipped to answer. This is the question the marketing planning cycle, in most institutions, is structurally designed to avoid.

The outcome is not the enrollment number. The outcome is the graduate who is, five years later, in a job that uses the credential. The outcome is the parent who is, five years later, satisfied with the decision. The outcome is the institution that is, ten years later, producing graduates who are producing the things the institution claims to produce.

The dashboard reports the enrollment number. The dashboard reports the lead generation number, the application number, the yield number, the cost per acquisition. The dashboard is, in the precise language of the situation, a precise measurement of the inputs to the outcome, not the outcome itself.

The planning cycle that is built on the dashboard is a planning cycle that is structurally aligned with the inputs and structurally misaligned with the outcome. The campaigns, the budget, the calendar will all be optimized for the inputs. The outcome will, in the precise language of organizational behavior, drift.

The second conversation of the planning cycle should be a conversation about the outcome. Not the metrics. The outcome. The five-year, ten-year, twenty-year version of the institution, and the specific role the marketing function is supposed to play in producing it.

The conversation is uncomfortable. The conversation is also, in the precise language of the situation, the only one that matters.

Question Three: Where Is the Institution in the Long Arc?

I have written about the long arc in the post titled The Marketing Director’s Job Is Not to Spend Money. It’s to Build Belief. The long arc is the multi-year, multi-touchpoint, multi-channel relationship that the institution has with its prospective students, its current students, its alumni, its faculty, its partners, and its community.

The long arc is, in the precise language of the situation, the asset. The campaigns, the content, the events, the community programs are the operations through which the asset is produced.

Most marketing planning cycles are organized around the operations. The campaign calendar is the artifact. The campaign calendar is, in the precise language of the long arc, a small fragment of the asset-building work the institution could be doing.

The question to ask, in the third conversation of the planning cycle, is: where is the institution in the long arc, and what is the specific operation the marketing function should be running, in this quarter, to move the institution along the arc?

The answer is not a campaign. The answer is a motion. The motion is multi-touchpoint, multi-quarter, and structured around the condition under which the prospective student, the current student, the parent, the alumnus, the partner, and the community are willing to act on behalf of the institution.

The planning cycle that is organized around the motion is a planning cycle that is structurally aligned with the asset. The dashboard will still report the inputs. The dashboard is not the headliner. The motion is the headliner.

Question Four: What Is the Institution Willing to Defend?

This is the question that most marketing planning cycles do not ask, because the question is uncomfortable, and the answer is often “less than the planning cycle requires.”

The workshop motion is expensive. The community motion is slow. The custom response motion is unscalable. The long-arc motion does not produce quarterly results. Every one of these motions, in the language of the planning cycle, is a candidate for elimination.

The question to ask, in the fourth conversation of the planning cycle, is: what motions is the institution willing to defend, against the quarterly reporting cycle, against the pressure to scale, against the operations that want to replace the motion with the funnel?

The answer reveals the institution. The institution that is willing to defend the workshop motion is an institution that is willing to be in the room with the customer. The institution that is willing to defend the community motion is an institution that is willing to invest in the relationships that produce belief. The institution that is willing to defend the custom response motion is an institution that is willing to produce the artifact that responds to the specific customer. The institution that is willing to defend the long-arc motion is an institution that is willing to wait for the result.

The institution that is not willing to defend any of these motions is an institution that has decided, in the precise language of the situation, to be a brochure.

Question Five: What Is the Institution Going to Stop Doing?

This is the question that the planning cycle is most structurally designed to avoid, and the question that is, in the precise language of the situation, the most important.

The budget conversation is, by construction, an additive conversation. The campaign calendar is, by construction, a list of things the institution is going to do. The agency relationships are, by construction, relationships the institution is going to maintain. The planning cycle is, by construction, a planning cycle about what is being added.

The question of what is being stopped is, in most planning cycles, never asked. The question of what is being stopped is, in the precise language of the situation, the only question that produces the capacity to do the work that matters.

The workshop motion requires the institution to stop running the campaigns that produce activity without producing belief. The community motion requires the institution to stop optimizing the social media channels for the metrics that do not correlate with the outcome. The custom response motion requires the institution to stop producing the templated response that scales. The long-arc motion requires the institution to stop reporting the quarterly number as if it were the headliner.

Every motion the institution is willing to defend requires the institution to stop something else. The planning cycle that does not have a clear answer to the question of what is being stopped is a planning cycle that is not actually planning. It is accumulating.

The fifth conversation of the planning cycle should be a conversation about what is being stopped. The conversation is, in the precise language of the profession, the most professional conversation a marketing leader can have.

The Order Matters

The five questions are in a deliberate order.

The buyer question comes first, because everything else is downstream of the actual transaction.

The outcome question comes second, because the dashboard is downstream of the outcome, not the other way around.

The long-arc question comes third, because the campaign calendar is downstream of the motion, not the other way around.

The defense question comes fourth, because the budget is downstream of the commitment, not the other way around.

The stop question comes last, because the capacity to do the work that matters is downstream of the willingness to stop doing the work that does not.

The planning cycle that is built in this order is a planning cycle that produces a marketing function that builds belief. The planning cycle that is built in the reverse order — budget first, campaign calendar second, agency relationships third, dashboard fourth, hope fifth — is a planning cycle that produces a marketing function that optimizes the wrong machine.

The five questions are not new. They are, in the precise language of the profession, the questions that have been asked, in some form, by every marketing leader who has understood the difference between the operations and the asset.

The questions are also, in the precise language of the actual planning cycle, the questions most often skipped.

The recruitment cycle is right around the corner. The budget conversations are starting. The agency reviews are being scheduled. The question is whether the five conversations will happen before any of it, or after.

The institutions that have the conversations first are the institutions that will still be enrolling students in five years. The institutions that skip the conversations are the institutions that will, slowly, watch their enrollments erode and their graduates tell their children a different story.

The questions are not new. The order is. The order is the work.