Book profile

Marketing plans how to prepare them, how to use them

McDonald, Malcolm

A practical, research-grounded guide that demystifies marketing planning by teaching managers how to prepare and use strategic and tactical marketing plans that match company capabilities to customer wants in order to create sustainable competitive advantage.

Based on extensive research into the marketing planning practices of industrial, consumer, and service companies, this book strips away the confusion and mythology surrounding marketing planning. Malcolm McDonald shows that most companies that think they are planning are merely forecasting and budgeting, and suffer grave operational consequences as a result. The book takes the reader painstakingly through the entire process: understanding the marketing concept, conducting a marketing audit, performing SWOT and portfolio analyses, setting marketing objectives and strategies, building advertising, sales, pricing and distribution plans, and finally designing and implementing a simple, step-by-step marketing planning system. Crucially, it deals not only with what should happen but with what goes wrong—the cultural, organizational, and political barriers to planning—and how to overcome them. It combines current best practice with the necessary theoretical background, making it equally valuable to practising marketing directors and to students preparing for professional marketing qualifications.

The model

A causal model in which the design and implementation of a structured marketing planning system, combined with rigorous analytical practices and leadership/cultural support, drives intermediate psychological and behavioral states (clarity of objectives, strategic orientation, competitive advantage) that in turn produce business outcomes such as profitability and stability.

Frameworks you can use

Match company capabilities to customer wants to achieve the objectives of both parties.
Customers buy benefits, not products or features.
Develop the strategic plan first; never write the one-year plan first and extrapolate it.
Set quantifiable, measurable marketing objectives about products and markets.
Conduct a systematic, structured marketing audit and summarize it as focused SWOT analyses.
Segment markets and choose the most attractive segments matched to your distinctive competence.

Key terms

Formalized Marketing Planning System: A structured, institutionalized approach to marketing planning consisting of written procedures and a common format that proceeds logically from situation review through assumptions, objectives, strategies, programmes, and review.
Marketing Audit Rigor: The systematic, critical, and unbiased review of the company's external (uncontrollable) and internal (controllable) variables that forms the data base for marketing planning.
Market Segmentation Quality: The effectiveness with which a company divides markets into viable, distinct, reachable segments of customers sharing similar needs and matches its competence to chosen segments.
Strategic Orientation: The extent to which management adopts a proactive, long-term, externally focused stance, developing strategy before tactics and involving all management levels.
Clarity and Prioritization of Marketing Objectives: The degree to which marketing objectives are quantified, measurable, focused on products and markets, prioritized, and logically derived from analysis.
Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A valued, distinctive benefit or cost position not obtainable elsewhere, achieved through cost leadership, differentiation, or focus and sustainable over time.
Chief Executive Support and Participation: The chief executive's understanding of, commitment to, and active involvement in the marketing planning process, providing the entrepreneurial dynamic and opening the planning loop.
Corporate Culture Readiness and Acceptance Level: The organization's life-phase culture and its level of acceptance of marketing planning, shaped by the behaviors of culture carriers and readiness to change.