• by Mat Zucker , Yesterday

More than ever, businesses need marketing to be ready for anything. Scenario planning is the key to that confidence. By creating response plans for a range of potential challenges, you can make your organization more prepared and more resilient. Here’s how to do it thoroughly, consistently, and fast.

Make a game board. Consider challenges the business might confront in the next six months (e.g., purchase declines, supply delays, negative feedback) and list them on one axis. Put levers you can control (e.g., ad spending, pricing, service policies) on the other.

Workshop the game. Put everyone -- marketing, sales, product, experience, service, digital -- in a room to play out scenarios. With each challenge, manipulate all the levers. For example, what happens if we increase or shift media spending? What if we make more personalized offers? Will new influencers or product aggregators move the needle? Do we expand our touchpoints to improve lead nurturing? Assign teams to own each lever and let them develop execution plans.

Accelerate with GenAI. Use tools to speed up the processing of insights and manage complexity. That way you can run the game-play scenarios right in the room and put data-backed reality to the what-if challenge. For example, let AI synthesize data from internal performance metrics and external market signals (news, customer behavior, economic indicators) to propose plausible future scenarios. The AI will surface correlations, risks, and blind spots your teams can’t.

That’s just the start. You can automate simulations to show likely outcomes of changes in ad spend, targeting, or messaging based on historical data. Then you can test message variants tailored to different emotional tones and audience personas in real time, and see how they play across channels -- from social posts to emails to product descriptions. That way, you’re not just planning, you’re pre-creating.

In workshops, GenAI can serve as a real-time assistant, capturing themes, proposing responses, and even visualizing outcomes on the fly.

The key is a real-time, interactive game rather than a series of isolated think sessions and briefs. You’re concentrating expertise and time, so you can do it as often as the marketplace confronts you with change.

Scenario planning has been around for centuries, and planners have always forged an advantage from the practice. What’s new is the scale, speed, and sophistication with which marketing needs to bring to it, given the urgency of our times. By making it fast, full, and fun, you can solve the main impediments (everyone’s on overload and pressed for time) to making it the regular practice it needs to be.