Planning frameworks: SOSTAC, RACE, the brief and the plan on a page

A planning framework is a set of questions asked in a sensible order, so that nothing important is skipped. None of them writes the plan for you; each makes gaps visible.

• SOSTAC, created by PR Smith, structures a whole plan: situation, objectives, strategy, tactics, action, control²³.
• RACE, created by Dave Chaffey at Smart Insights, organises activity around the customer lifecycle: plan, reach, act, convert, engage⁵.
• Account planning, the agency discipline that brings the consumer's view into strategy and creative work, supplies the insight and the brief⁸.
• The documents that turn a plan into work are the campaign brief, the creative brief, the media plan and, for integration, the plan on a page.
• The best choice depends on what you are planning: a business's whole marketing, a digital programme, or one campaign.

SOSTAC

PR Smith, a marketing consultant and author, created the SOSTAC planning framework². The six letters stand for situation analysis, objectives, strategy, tactics, action and control³. PR Smith's own site frames the first stages as plain questions: where are we now, where do we want to be, and how do we get there¹. Smart Insights reports that SOSTAC was voted the third most popular model in a Chartered Institute of Marketing poll on marketing models³. Smith and Ze Zook's textbook Marketing Communications, now in an 8th edition published by Kogan Page in 2024, sets the model inside integrated marketing communications⁴.

Smith also proposed five broad kinds of objective, the "5Ss": sell, serve, speak, save and sizzle³. They are a useful reminder that a communication plan can aim to serve customers, open a dialogue, save costs or add brand value, not only to sell.

The stage most often rushed is the first. A useful situation analysis for an integrated plan covers the market and its trends, the customers and how they buy, the competitors and what they say, the brand's current position in people's minds, the performance of last period's activity in every discipline, and the organisation's own resources. If those facts are not on the table, the objectives that follow are guesses.

RACE

Dave Chaffey created RACE in 2010, when Smart Insights launched, because many businesses had no well-formed digital marketing strategy⁵. It covers the customer lifecycle: reach builds awareness and traffic across paid, owned and earned media; act, short for interact, turns visits into leads and interactions; convert turns them into paying customers, online or offline; engage builds loyalty and advocacy⁵. A plan stage comes first, to set the strategy⁷.

Using them together

The two are complementary rather than rival. Smart Insights shows how to use RACE inside a SOSTAC plan⁶: SOSTAC provides the plan's spine, and RACE organises the strategy and tactics stages around the lifecycle, with KPIs at each step. In IMC terms, RACE is close to the customer journey described in touchpoints and the journey, and its reach stage is where paid, owned, earned and shared media meet (the PESO model).

Most frameworks come from client-side marketing. Agencies brought another tradition: account planning, which puts research and the consumer's point of view into strategy and creative development. The Account Planning Group (APG) describes Stephen King of J. Walter Thompson and Stanley Pollitt of BMP as its undisputed forefathers⁸. King's papers, written at JWT between 1967 and 1985, were collected by Judie Lannon and Merry Baskin in A Master Class in Brand Planning, published by Wiley in 2007⁹.

The planner's most visible product is the brief, and the evidence says briefs are where many plans go wrong. The BetterBriefs global study, which surveyed more than 1,700 people in over 70 countries and was presented with the IPA in 2021, found that 80% of marketers think they write good briefs while only 10% of agencies agree; respondents estimated that a third of marketing budgets is wasted through poor briefs and misdirected work¹⁰. A 2022 UK follow-up of 508 marketers and agency staff found that only 6% of agencies were clear on the strategic direction of the briefs they received, and 73% thought the briefs were not good enough; it came with a best-practice guide co-written by Mark Ritson¹¹. The IPA publishes that guide, The best way for a client to brief an agency¹².

Four documents carry most plans from strategy into work:

• The campaign brief (from client to all agencies and teams): the business and marketing problem, objectives and KPIs, audience, budget, timing, mandatories. It should be the same brief for every discipline.
• The creative brief (from planner to creative team): one audience insight, one proposition, the reasons to believe, the tone, and what the work should make people think, feel and do. The message house supplies its content.
• The communication and media plan: which channels play which role in the journey, with what reach, frequency and timing, and how paid, owned, earned and shared parts connect. The IPA's best-practice guide on communication strategy covers this step¹³.
• The evaluation plan: how each objective will be measured, written before launch. AMEC's framework includes planning guidance for exactly this¹⁵.

The documents form a chain, and integration breaks wherever a link is missing. A creative brief written without the campaign brief produces work that answers a different question; a media plan written before the creative idea exists buys space for an idea nobody has had; an evaluation plan written after launch measures whatever happens to be available. The order matters: campaign brief, then creative brief and communication plan together, then the detailed media and channel plans, with the evaluation plan agreed alongside the campaign brief.

For integration, the most useful single document is the one that fits all of this on a page:

The page works as a contract between teams. It is also how creative work can be judged fairly: the IPA, ISBA, the MCCA and the PRCA's joint guide to judging creative ideas sets out shared criteria for exactly that conversation between clients and agencies¹⁴.

• Planning a whole business's marketing for the year? Use SOSTAC as the skeleton; it forces a situation analysis and a control stage, which are the two most often skipped.
• Planning a digital or lifecycle programme? Use RACE, with KPIs at each stage, and place it inside the SOSTAC strategy and tactics stages if a wider plan exists.
• Planning one campaign? Start from the campaign brief and the creative brief; the account-planning questions (who, what they think now, what should change) matter more than the acronym.
• Planning communication that is mostly PR and earned media? Pair the brief with AMEC's framework, so that outputs, out-takes and outcomes are defined from the start.
• Small team? One page and one shared brief beat a long document nobody reads. The framework should take hours, not weeks.

Whatever you choose, use the same words in every document: the objectives from objectives and KPIs, the money from budgeting for IMC, and the measures from measuring effectiveness.

1. Write the situation analysis first: market, customers, competitors, the brand's position, and last period's results.
2. Pick one framework for the plan's spine and say so in the document.
3. Write one campaign brief, approved by the client lead, and send the same brief to every agency and internal team.
4. Test the brief: can each agency explain the strategic direction back in its own words? If not, rewrite it.
5. Draft the plan on a page and agree channel roles before any discipline plans its own detail.
6. Put the evaluation plan in before launch, with baselines.
7. Close the loop: schedule the control review, and feed its findings into next period's situation analysis.

• PR Smith on SOSTAC¹ and Smart Insights' SOSTAC guide³; Smith and Zook's Marketing Communications⁴.
• Smart Insights on RACE⁵ and on combining the two⁶.
• The APG on account planning⁸ and Stephen King's collected papers⁹.
• The BetterBriefs research¹⁰ and the IPA's briefing guide¹².
• On IMC Institute: organising for IMC and the what is IMC primer.