Often the pursuit of sales and profit growth can lead companies to ignore or underestimate risk in selecting projects to pursue. Marketers often focus on optimizing awareness, preference, purchase, market share, and ROI. Opportunity assessment-During new program and new product opportunity assessment, marketers evaluate and compare the market opportunity of different strategies and concepts.Different initiatives and strategic choices carry different types and levels of marketing risk. Marketing planning-Risk can enter your marketing plans as you begin to build them.Marketing risk management is anticipating risk and then taking action to remove or reduce that risk in your marketing development and execution. You likely implement a number of different marketing risk management initiatives already whether you think of them that way or not. The best developed new product, program, or plan can come apart for a variety of reasons. If you have worked in marketing for a while, you know that different types of marketing risk are very real. Does the same thing apply to marketing leadership? Can you protect yourself from market and marketing risk? Are there steps you can take to help ensure your months of planning and preparation do not go up in smoke? The Need For Marketing Risk Management If you are a financial manager, you can diversify a portfolio or hedge currencies to limit your risk exposure. Will you succeed? The answer to this question may depend on how much time you have spent anticipating and mitigating the potential risk in your marketing plans. You have built your marketing plan, started your execution, and are ready to launch.