MARKETING MANAGEMENT: PLANNING

1.0 Planning

Planning is a process for accomplishing purpose. It is blue print of business growth and a road map of development. It is a part of managers’ roles and it helps to derive organization forwards by coordinating resources and channeling them towards the achievement of pre determined goals. Planning can help to provide a framework for considering the future, appraising the various options and developing strategies to meet the organization objectives. Planning encourages people to consider the future and to realize that change is inevitable in a rapidly developing world. It also highlights the important of long term tasks. Through planning organization will successfully identify threats and polished the opportunities in the form of competitor activity.

The steps involve in planning are analysis, planning, implementation and control. Analysis is essential to understand the current situation before identifying the direction in which the organization wants to go. It involves a complete review of the external and internal environment in order to identify opportunities. The information generated from this step will help to define the future strategy and will be utilized at all stages of the planning. Planning is concerned with objectives and strategies to help to achieve these objectives. In marketing, it would be concerned with marketing product or brand plans.

Implementation is concerned with turning the plans into action and involves decisions relating to resources such as people and finance.

Companies often overlook implementation and it is at this stage that many plans fail not because they were poor strategies but because they were poorly implemented. A key element of the planning process is the evaluation of the plan. It is necessary to measure the success of the plan and to take corrective action if necessary.

Figure 1: Planning Process

2.0 Marketing Planning

Marketing planning is a system or process of assesses to marketing opportunities and resources determine marketing objective and develop a thorough plan for implementation and control. It also decides what it wants to do with each business unit and help the company attain its overall strategic objectives.

The marketing planning process commonly operates at 2 levels either strategic marketing plan or tactical marketing plan.

Strategic marketing plan is concerned with the total strategy in terms of customers, competitors and organizational capability and focused at an SBU or company level. Whereas, tactical marketing plan specifies the marketing tactics such as pricing, promotion, product features etc and more concerned with products or market segments.

The stages in the planning process consist of the business mission, SWOT analysis, goal formulation, strategy formulation, program formulation, implementation and feedback and control.

The planning process begin with each business unit needs to define its specific mission within the broader company mission. Second, the company needs to do overall evaluation of company’s strength, weakness, opportunities and threats. It involves monitoring the external and internal marketing environment.

Third, the company develops specific goals for the planning period. The term ‘goal’ used to describe objectives that are specific with respects to magnitude and time. The objective must be arranged hierarchically, specific, realistic and consistent. Fourth, the company must design a strategy for achieving its goals.

Fifth, formulate the strategy into action. Sixth, implement the program or action. Lastly, the company needs to controlled, monitored and evaluate the result of action to ensure the objectives are being met.

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3.0 The Importance Of Marketing Planning

        The importance of having marketing plan is it provides an unambiguous reference point for activities throughout the planning period. However, perhaps the most important benefit of these plans is the planning process itself. Beside, marketing planning also provides framework to think about what you want to achieve, when you want to achieve it and what actions are needed to achieve it where marketing planning also made the company able to target the best customer, competitive advantage to beat competitor, keeping abreast of marketing development, maximizing returns for the organization, fully utilized ...

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