Marketing Plan

Marketing executives are often required to 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.

Planning is the process of using related fact and future assumptions to arrive at courses of action to be followed in seeking specific goals. Simply put, 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 chicken 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 should 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."

Different Business Plans – Marketing and the Corporate Planning Process

All business plans have a heavy marketing input. Attention will be given here to two plans – the corporate (strategic or business) plan and the marketing plan (for the whole company, a division, a product line or an individual product).

The corporate, business or strategic plan is an overall plan for a firm. It can be annual, intermediate or long-range. It deals with companies’ missions; growth strategies; portfolio decisions; investment decisions and current objectives and goals. It does not contain details on the activities of individual business units, but it does provide for the development of organizational structure as a logical outflow of strategy.

Formulation of Corporate Strategy

The process starts with a situation analysis, also known as a SWOT analysis. The organization must analyse its resources to identify what is strengths and weaknesses are. At the same time, the organization must scan the environment in which it operates. This environment consists of political, legal, economic, sociocultural and technological variables, which, although largely uncontrollable by the individual firm, will affect it in many ways. The environmental variables will mean opportunities for some firms and threats for other. It is important that the firm attempt to identify these and assess the impact they will have. The situation analysis (SWOT = strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) will give the firm a clear picture of its current situation. The next step is to determine where the firm ought to go. This involves a process of goal formulation. The firm must formulate a mission statement or definition of its business; it must identify major objectives and it must specify goals that it will strive to achieve.

Having defined where it is and where it wants to go, the organization must formulate strategies that will enable it to get there. In the model above, strategy formulation is viewed as consisting of two phases. Product portfolio strategy involves asking the question, what products or major service lines do the organization have now, and what will it do with them? This question moves it to the second phase: growth strategy requires that the organization ask what it is going to do about new products and entering new markets.

Choosing a strategy requires that the organization be designed in such a way as to be able to carry out his strategy. The organization must have a structure, it must have people and it must have a congruent culture if goal attainment through the chosen strategy is to be realized.

If the strategic process is to be successful, it must be supported by three systems.

Firstly, there must be a planning system, for the development of formal, disciplined plans.

Secondly, there must be an information system that provides for a flow of relevant, timely information for decision-making.

Thirdly, there must be an adequate control system, which allows for the monitoring of plans, the measurement of results and the taking of corrective action.