You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow. Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here. -Mark Schaefer
The most important time of my professional work life was studying under Peter Drucker when I pursued my MBA at Claremont Graduate University. Peter Drucker is considered one of the most influential management thinkers of the 20th century. He was also a kind and generous teacher and mentor.
Dr. Drucker would come into class on a Saturday morning and talk about his books. It was impossible to outline his lectures! His lessons danced and darted around as he talked about the ideas that created modern marketing and management as we know it.
But one of the most interesting lectures was about a book he had yet to write. He gave us a preview of what has come to be known as Drucker’s Five Questions. Many of Dr. Drucker’s lectures are burned in my mind, but this lesson, which was published posthumously as a book in 2008, is always part of my consulting strategy.
I have met a few geniuses in my life, and they all have the same trait. They can distill incredible complexity into an essence. And so it is with the timeless nature of Peter Drucker’s Five Questions.
And yet, so many of my students and customers have never heard of them before. I thought it was time I shine a light on them once more, if for no other reason than to use this post as a reference for my future classes!
Drucker’s Five Questions are:
1. What is our mission?
2. Who is our customer?
3. What does the customer value?
4. What are our results?
5. What is our plan?
Drucker’s five questions and marketing today
When it comes to marketing, these five questions are still highly relevant and can be used to help develop effective strategies. In fact, they are at the foundation of my process and I pull these out constantly with my clients.
1. “What is our mission?”
This question helps define the overall purpose of the organization and the goals that it is trying to achieve. This is important for marketing as it helps to ensure that the marketing activities are aligned with the organization’s mission and goals. It also helps to define the target market that the organization is trying to reach and the message that it is trying to communicate.
The answer to this question is not as simple as it may seem and more relevant than ever. In my book Belonging to the Brand, this is a central idea when defining the purpose of community-based marketing. You can’t move forward without it!
This is also relevant for personal brands. A personal brand is not about you. It is about serving others. What is the mission?
One of Drucker’s amazing insights was that a company had to be about more than making money. This was a radical idea in his day but obviously important to consider in today’s consumer environment.
2. “Who is our customer?”
This question helps identify who the organization is targeting with its marketing activities.
This is critical as it helps to ensure that the organization’s marketing efforts are focused on the right audience and that the right message is being communicated. Knowing the customer also helps to inform marketing activities such as pricing, positioning, and promotion.
Again, this question is deceptively simple. Even with sophisticated social listening and other analytical tools, I see companies fumbling with their assumptions about customers!
I don’t trust any data before March of 2020. If you haven’t assessed how the pandemic changed your customers, go out there and re-discover them.
3. “What does the customer value?”
This helps zero-in on the needs and wants of the customer. Knowing what the customer values helps to inform the organization’s marketing activities and ensure that the message being communicated is relevant and meaningful to the customer.
One lesson I learned from Dr. Drucker, was “never mistake what you’re selling for what the customer is actually buying.”
Another important step when answering this question is to evaluate how competitors might be already serving these needs. You can’t offer a me-too product.
4. “What are our results?”
Now it starts to get complicated!
One of Dr. Drucker’s most famous quotes is, “You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.”
We need to measure and evaluate the effectiveness of the organization’s marketing activities. Obviously, this is important as it helps to identify which activities are working and which are not, leading to more informed decisions about future marketing activities.
However, with the speed of change in the world today, we may have to act before we have the measurement fully figured out. Remember, Dr. Drucker’s ideas were forged in the 1980s. Even though he was a true visionary who foresaw the gig economy and many of the realities of today, I do believe he would encourage us to respond to cultural changes with relevant marketing ideas.
“The purpose of a business is to create customers,” he would say. Creating customers today is a jerky process that may elude easy measurement in some cases.
5. “What is our plan?”
The final part of Drucker’s Five Questions is, “What is our plan?” helps to develop a comprehensive strategy for the organization’s marketing activities. This ensures that the organization has a clear plan in place and that the marketing activities are coordinated and effective.
Marketing strategy might seem overwhelming today, but it’s not if you make it through Drucker’s Five Questions. Here’s my secret: If you do the work to answer these questions thoroughly, your marketing strategy becomes obvious. You probably don’t have as many options as you think! If you evaluate the competitive landscape, you only have so many cards in your hands to play.
Beyond Drucker’s Five Questions
Dr. Drucker is still the most quoted business guru in history. I am completely blown away by how prescient his work is. If you don’t know this great man, here are four books among the dozens he wrote that are quite meaningful to me:
Classic Drucker — A compilation of famous essays from Harvard Business Review. A good place for inspiration!
The Five Most Important Questions — An essential book for strategy that I mentioned in this post.
Innovation and Entrepreneurship — This is a book I have read 10 times. It was originally published in 1985 yet provides a fresh and realistic framework for institutionalizing innovation in a company culture.
Post-Capitalist Society — Dr. Drucker was way ahead of his time and this book projects a world of capitalism out of control and what can be done.
Essential Drucker — A summary of sixty years of his most influential writings
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