Marketing Plan

Marketing executives must develop marketing plans. The brief guide provided in this chapter is intended to serve as a modular approach to marketing planning for the marketing executive, regardless of level of academic expertise. Following the steps in the planning processes should result in useful, workable plans rather than clever ones.

What is Planning

Planning is the process of using related facts and future assumptions to arrive at courses of action to be followed in seeking specific goals. Simply, planning is drawing from the past to help you decide in the present what you should do in the future.

Companies without plans tend to be like chickens with their heads chopped off. If one does not have a plan one cannot get anything done – because one does not know what needs to be done or how to do it. Furthermore, good plans can be adapted when circumstances change. Planning is also about learning the lessons that history teaches, which makes it as much about the past as the future. If you planned in the past and the plans went wrong and did not turn out as you had expected, at the very least you can learn from this. As Gabriel Garcia Marquez points out, “Those who forget the lessons of the past are condemned to repeat them.”