A 2025 Planning Swipefile

A list of research and resources to jumpstart your strategic planning work

note: The audio below is synthetic. It was created by NotebookLM from Google as a test. It turned out pretty good, but only “pretty good”. Not a silver bullet.

Background

In my corporate days, I’d spend June, July and August working on LRP (Long Range Planning) Themes for our internal stakeholders and my peers. The themes were, essentially, guidance on the assumptions we were using to shape our strategies and operating plans. Our intent was to share a point of view on the external forces that drive consumer behaviors (media, technology, societal/demographic issues), the competitive landscape, and the overall economic environment we were operating in.

The work to get to those themes started with a review of external perspectives, forecasts and predictions. We’d consult with all our vendors and our software partners to gather decks, presentations and briefing reports. Once we had all the inputs on a shared drive, we’d start to work through them as a team. The “liberal arts” guy in me loved the analysis of all the materials, and the deep reading required to identify the not-obvious ideas and implications.

So, to help you and your team, I put together a list of resources that might be useful inputs as you develop a POV on the externals that should shape your strategic plan and operating plans for 2025

Tech and AI Trends

McKinsey technology trends outlook 2024 – As you’d imagine: thoughtful and good. A few key quotes for your decks

AI and Everything Else – Benedict Evans – SuperAI 2024 – This is a sprint through a bunch of topics related to AI, with a really clear-eyed perspective on what’s real and what’s BS

KPMG GenAI Executive Survey 2024

Precedence research: Snapshot of the AI landscape – https://www.precedenceresearch.com/artificial-intelligence-market Some stats to worry and impress your bosses. Also, an interesting source. Looks like they are buying/compiling other data sources and using AI/ML/LLMs to generate output.

Consumer Landscape

The CMO Survey – Highlights and Insights Report – Spring 2024 If you can put up with Slideshare, this is a pretty good reminder of what was on the minds of CMOs in early 2024.

Deloitte Future Consumer Research This might be out of date, but it’s still pretty relevant for the next year

The 2024 Social Media Content Strategy Report – Nice overview of the next year and some insights into potential strategic shifts – via @gregswan

Goodway Group’s B2C Digital Marketing Trends for 2025

Perspectives: Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2024–2028

Ernst & Young’s 2024 Mid-year Outlook

Employee Engagement

Ford’s Futurists Share Trends ’24

via David Armano’s TBD newsletter

How to synthesize all this?

Now that you’ve got the data, what do you do with it? Like most marketing teams, you’ll probably feel like you’re jammed in a paradox: You probably feel like you don’t have enough (or the exact, right) inputs, but you might also have too much to work with. The effort to winnow it all down was interesting, but hard.

Now, though, we can put ChatGPT to work.

Taking a tip from Greg Swan, Tim Brunelle and David Armano , I used NotebookLM to generate an audio overview of the data. It’s smarter than an intern, but not smarter than your teammates, so the quality here is iffy. but, you get a sense of some of the trends.

What Else?

Let me know if you have any other research reports to include in this list. I’ll keep a running list of other inputs on my personal site, at https://cuene.com/2024/09/25/swipe-file-2025-planning-inputs/.