Create an effective marketing planning for business success. Learn to set goals, define strategy, target audiences, and measure results.
Marketing Planning: A Comprehensive Overview
Ready to plan your marketing? Get expert insights and a step-by-step guide to developing a powerful marketing strategy for growth.
Introduction and Core Concept
Planning is the fundamental function of management, preceding all others. Marketing planning serves as the crucial starting point for all marketing and business activities within an organization. Given the dynamic nature of the business environment, the importance of effective marketing planning has significantly increased.
Definition and Process
Marketing planning is a systematic process involving:
- Analysis: Examining the current situation and information regarding market opportunities.
- Forecasting & Premise Setting: Predicting future trends and establishing planning assumptions.
- Targeting: Selecting the specific target market(s).
- Objective Determination: Setting clear marketing goals.
- Strategy Development: Designing and developing a marketing strategy or course of action to achieve these objectives.
- Resource Allocation: Distributing resources among the elements of the marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion, etc.).
- Policy Development: Creating necessary procedures and policies.
Scope and Types of Planning
Marketing planning activities are broadly categorized by their time horizon:
- Long-Term Marketing Planning (Strategic): Focuses on basic objectives and strategy, typically spanning two or more years (often five to twenty). It’s conducted by top management.
- Components (Philip Kotler): Diagnosis (current situation), Prognosis (future estimation), Objectives, Strategy (broad principles), Tactics (methods for carrying out strategies), and Control.
- Short-Term or Annual Marketing Planning (Tactical): Detailed plans prepared yearly, ideally within the framework of the long-range plan.
- Approaches: Goal Planning, Optimization Planning, and External Planning.
The term “marketing plan” can refer to several types of plans within a company:
- Corporate Plan
- Divisional Plan
- Product-Line Plan
- Product Plan
- Product/Market Plan
- Brand Plan
- Market Plan
- Functional Plan (e.g., advertising plan, sales-force plan)
Essential Elements
The four major elements that constitute a marketing plan are:
- Objectives or Goals: Statements of desired outcomes, such as increased profit, sales, or market share.
- Programmes: Detailed action plans outlining departmental responsibilities to achieve set goals within a specific timeframe (e.g., product development program, advertising program).
- Completion Schedule: A time-bound timetable with fixed deadlines for starting and completing marketing activities.
- Budgeting: A financial document indicating the resources allocated to fund all marketing activities, serving as a basis for control.
Why Marketing Planning is Essential (Importance)
In today’s fragmented, complex, and rapidly changing markets, marketing planning is crucial because it:
- Faces Future Uncertainties: Provides a defense against unforeseen risks through careful analysis and forecasting.
- Provides Focus: Aligns all marketing activities and programs towards common, organizationally-aligned goals.
- Utilizes Opportunities: Helps identify and capitalize on future opportunities before competitors.
- Determines the Right Marketing Mix: Guides the creation of an optimal blend of marketing elements to maximize customer appeal.
- Enhances Coordination: Ensures the marketing department’s activities are coordinated with overall corporate objectives and other departments.
- Satisfies the Customer: Directs all efforts toward understanding and fulfilling customer wants and needs, which is the key to profitability.
- Aids Management: Clarifies priorities and delivers better market information, improved inter-functional coordination, reduced waste, and greater overall business control.
Approaches to Marketing Planning
Key strategic approaches include:
- Profit Impact of Marketing Strategies (PIMS): A study that identified key variables, such as market share, that significantly affect profitability.
- Portfolio Models: Tools used for strategic planning, such as:
- Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Approach (Stars, Cash Cows, Question Marks, Dogs)
- General Electric (GE) Model (market attractiveness vs. SBU strength)
- Arthur D. Little Life Cycle Portfolio Matrix (industry life cycle stages)
- Shell’s Directional Policy Matrix (profitability prospects vs. competitive capability)
- Competitive Analysis: Focusing on gaining an advantage over rivals.
Components of a Good Marketing Plan
A comprehensive and effective marketing plan should contain:
- Mission statement
- Financial summary
- Market overview (marketing audit summary)
- SWOT analysis
- Assumptions
- Marketing objectives and strategies
- Programmes, with forecasts and budgets
Implementation and Key Elements
The successful implementation of a plan faces external (macro and micro-environment changes) and internal (resource competition, lack of cross-functional support) challenges.
Key elements for successful implementation include:
- Leadership: Senior management must be committed, take ultimate responsibility, and empower managers.
- Internal Marketing: The marketing program must be “sold” to internal employees (internal customers) to ensure commitment and support. This involves segmenting the internal market and developing an internal marketing mix.
- Project Management: Treating plan implementation as a series of projects with defined goals, budgets, and schedules. The Project Manager is crucial for planning, delegation, coordination, monitoring, and problem-solving.
- Managing Change: The business must constantly adapt its strategies and internal operations (product portfolio, processes, structure, etc.) to changes in the external environment.
Barriers to Marketing Planning
Planning often fails not due to the process itself, but due to how it is managed. Common barriers include:
- Weak support from top management.
- Lack of a specific “plan for planning.”
- Lack of line management support (hostility, lack of skills/resources).
- Confusion over planning terminology.
- Over-reliance on numbers without clear written objectives and strategies.
- Too much detail or planning too far in advance.
- Treating planning as an isolated, “once-a-year ritual.”
- Separating operational and strategic planning.
- Failing to integrate marketing planning into the total corporate planning system.
- Delegating the core planning responsibility entirely to a planner.
