• by Todd Wasserman , April 19, 2023

Do you have a Plan B in case your Plan A goes wrong? A survey from Gartner found most marketers have a Plan B, but relatively few follow them. The numbers: that 81% of marketing leaders have contingency plans in response to disruptions, but only 21% of them actually followed them.

It found that 44% of digital marketing leaders who enacted such plans exceeded organization year-over-year profit growth.

Greg Carlucci, senior director analyst at Gartner, said it’s a little surprising that most marketers don’t follow their contingency plans. “But with that said, with inflation and all the economic activity that's going on, it's likely to increase or exacerbate the number of plans that can be followed.”

Carlucci said the downside of not having a contingency plan is it “makes more challenging decisions more difficult without having a reference point of, we plan for this or we proactively evaluate how this may impact our business.”

It's possible the frenetic activity of the past three years or so has complicated things for marketers, Carlucci said. “I'd say that there's almost a constant motion of evaluating and filtering that marketing leaders are now faced with, so I think that's made it more difficult to sit down and enact or create a potential scenario for events that occur,” he said. “Just based off the results of the survey, organizations are more reactive than proactive when it comes to disruptive events.”

The survey polled nearly 4000 marketing leaders between November and December 2022.