MARKETING PLANS AND PLANNING
Application: Resource Allocation
The Concept
Planning is a fundamental process of the marketing function. A plan aligns marketing resources and actions to both the leadership’s priorities and budgets available. It makes strategic objectives achievable. However it is developed, there are several issues which will round out and make a marketing plan effective:
Strategic context. The plan must take into account the strategic issues which the firm faces, particularly those with direct market relevance such as: target markets, brand, segmentation, and competitive strategy. The strategic imperatives and corporate objectives of the firm must set the context for the plan. So, marketers must understand the business strategy before creating either marketing strategy or a marketing plan.
Market perspective. No market plan is useful unless its approach is based on insight and perspectives on the market it addresses. A method of gaining market insight (such as research, a market audit, or scenario planning) ought to be used as a foundation of a market plan. Some academics are probably too rigorous in demanding that a market plan be founded on logical, sequential market analysis but market insight is crucial. It is good discipline to separate market analysis from the synthesis needed to gain profound market insight.
Scope. There are a number of issues the plan needs to address in order to give it maximum impact. They range from communication with different audiences to adjustments to product or service features; from pricing to changes in account selection and revenue targets. The most recognized concept which summarizes the elements that need to be draw into a marketing plan is the “marketing mix” but that is seriously inadequate (see separate entry). The marketing team should include all these elements in the marketing plans of the business, even if their part of the organization is not directly responsible for them. The marketing plan is the plan for the whole firm, not just their function.
The content of a marketing plan ought to cover:
- Marketing objectives (including communication take out)
- NPD/NSD programmes and associated pricing changes
- Specific sales initiatives
- External communication programmes
- Internal communication and training programmes
- General brand and public face programmes (including collateral)
- Channel programmes
- Organizational development programmes (e.g. database or HR)
- Measures and targets.
Professor Malcolm McDonald (McDonald, M.H.B. and Wilson, H., 2011) has written extensively on this subject. He proposes a very clear and sequential set of ideas to think through: business vision, corporate objectives, insights from the market audit, market overview, SWOT analysis, assumptions, marketing objectives and strategies, estimated expected results, alternative mixes, budget and detailed implementation programme.
Dialogue. Marketing plans must be constructed in dialogue with key stakeholders. They should be consulted at the start, during the analysis, and as preliminary conclusions are drawn. This communication needs to be two-way, engaging them and including their views. It will ensure that the final plan is approved more easily.
Organizational politics. Most marketing plans involve projects and changes which affect the jobs of many across the organization. This means that market planning is a political process. Significant initiatives could be lost simply through irrational emotional resistance. Any experienced marketer will create a political map as part of the whole market planning process.
The things which make market planning effective are:
- Support from senior management
- Simplicity and identification of important strategic priorities
- Political sensitivity
- Shared responsibility across functions
- Long-term goals being recognized and taken on board
- Ambitions are achievable and easily accepted
- There must be built in flexibility to accommodate changing conditions.
The market planning process ought to combine all these features if it is to be successful. It should be based on relevant strategy and analytical insight. It must embrace all relevant activities and create practical, budgeted programmes. A full approach, likely to be adopted by a large, corporate firm, is represented in Figure M.11 above.
Figure M.11 A representation of modern, systems-based market plans and strategy development
History, Context, Criticism, and Development
It is possible to trace reports of effective and detailed market planning back to at least the start of the 20th century. One text book (Butler, R.S., 1917) uses the phrase so easily that it must have been in common use at the time. Although there is no use of the terms “strategy” or “marketing mix”, the author stresses the need to make all aspects of marketing (advertising, direct marketing, price, and sales) the subject of a detailed and professional plan. He also argues that it should be based on thorough market analysis.
Much of the detail that is suggested today, evolved though in the latter half of the twentieth century. For those that need it there are extensive, inter-related processes and concepts which lock market planning into corporate strategy, market analysis and marketing strategy.
Voices and Further Reading
- “Necessity of a marketing plan: … there must be definite advance knowledge of the methods to be used in marketing an article or the stock of a store, before the selling starts. Opposed to a planned campaigns that are the hit-or-miss unplanned trials of this scheme or the vacillating, wavering attitude of the man who does not know exactly what he wants to do or how he wants to do it …” Butler, R.S., 1917.
- “Just as in modern production management, there is a special division organized for the planning in detail of marketing processes and operations. … Planning in marketing, as elsewhere, means setting up policies and objectives, establishing standards, providing suitable means of procedure and arranging for the actual steps involved in carrying out the work in hand.” White, P., 1927.
- McDonald, M.H.B. and Wilson, H., Marketing Plans. How to Prepare Them: How to Use Them. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2011 (7th edn). A very extensive and logical treatise on the subject of market planning.
- “Any manager will readily agree that a sensible way to manage the sales and marketing function is to find a systematic way of identifying a range of options, to choose one or more of them, then to schedule and cost out what has to be done to achieve the objectives. Marketing planning, then, is simply a logical sequence and a series of activities leading to the setting of marketing objectives and the formulation of plans for achieving them. Companies generally go through some kind of management process in developing marketing plans. In small, undiversified companies, this process is usually informal. In larger, more diversified organizations, the process is often systematized. Conceptually this process is very simple, and involves a situation review, the formulation of some basic assumptions, setting objectives for what is being sold and to whom, deciding on how the objectives are to be achieved, and scheduling and costing out the actions necessary for implementation.” McDonald, ibid.
- “To carry weight, RM and CRM aspects must be introduced in the marketing planning process. Marketing in the light of relationships, networks and interactions becomes marketing-orientated management, and therefore the marketing plan must be an integral part of the company’s overall business plan.” Gummerson, E., 2003.
Things You Might Like to Consider
(i) Many modern firms use campaign management systems to plan the details of programmes and campaigns. These electronic tools become default marketing plans. However, it is easy to forget that these are de facto marketing plans and to simply load campaigns and programmes into them. Marketers ought to step back and ensure that they are working through the thinking of both the business strategy and marketing strategy, before they do so.
(ii) Some firms plan rigorously as part of an annual cycle while some are more short-term, not even committing plans to any form of document. Yet, whether it is elaborate, detailed, and long prepared or simply a series of decisions expressed by a leader, all firms should plan their approach to market.
(iii) Some large firms have separate plans for subsets of the marketing function like communications.
(iv) Despite the extensive theoretical body of work on market planning it is without doubt that some organizations thrive and conduct excellent marketing through intuition with hardly any planning at all.
(v) These should probably be separate plans for different segments and geographics.
RATING: Practical and powerful