A marketing plan, like a business plan, is unique to the company it serves. There are few hard and fast rules that guide its creation and implementation. A marketing plan needs to be as flexible as its mar¬ket allows and as firm as is required to accomplish its goals. Despite all that, there are a few key components critical to the successful development and application of such a plan:

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• A good marketing plan has both strategic and tactical elements designed to help identify and accomplish its goals. Despite the fact that marketing often appears to be no more than the implementation of direction from the corner office, the best ones also contain elements of strategy that reflect and enhance those principles identified at the highest level. Too often, marketing efforts are seen only as a media placement plan or advertising schedule. The best ones are much more than that and, quite frankly, need to be if they are going to succeed at more than the most episodic and rudimentary level.

• A good marketing plan is intertwined with the corporate business plan and, in fact, may actually be that plan, or at least include the business plan's goals expressed in terms of tactics. Despite what we said in the previous paragraph, the marketing plan can't exist in and of itself without intrinsic links to the company's overall strategies. They are two sides of the same coin and must be played together in order for either to succeed. Marketers who think they can operate independently of corporate goals think incorrectly and either their goals, or those of the company, will be compromised if they try.

• A good marketing plan is an active, living document designed to accomplish tasks, not a theoretical exercise destined to sit on the shelf. Marketing is a lot like dancing in that, if you don't execute the moves, it does anyone little good that you know all the steps. The best marketing plans are dog-eared documents with pencil edits and handwritten commentary that are falling apart at the seams. That shows they've been used and used well. The worst plans are pristine volumes that sit on shelves and gather dust. There are no grades for neatness when it comes to your marketing plan.

• Good marketers know that all things commercial revolve around marketing. That will sound heretical to anyone who is not a marketer, but when you get right down to it, marketing impacts virtually every aspect of commerce. As much as any other member of a company's executive team, the marketer's influence is felt throughout the enterprise and down the ranks.

Remember the five Ps of marketing? Perhaps it's good to review them once again so you may judge for yourself the depth and breadth of marketing's impact:

• Product: the goods or services that you market and sell.
• Price: the value of those goods or services quantified in monetary terms.
• Promotion: how you communicate the benefits of those goods and services.
• Place: how you expose buyers to products and get products into their hands.
• Position: the way the product is perceived in the mind of the buyer.

In each of those instances, the marketer plays the most crucial role in determining value rather than, or at least in cooperation with, other executives who otherwise might be considered appropriate to the task. Take pricing, for instance. Isn't that a function of the chief financial officer? Doesn't the CFO have responsibility for the company's financial stability and profitability?

The CFO certainly does have those responsibilities, but he or she can't determine the price of a product without knowing the price at which the competition is selling its products and what the market will bear for such goods. Identifying the proper margin over the cost production is part of price determination, but it plays a relatively small role in the pricing equation.

Good pricing and its related profitability, instead, are based on the strategic machinations of the other four Ps, as well as market conditions, buyer preferences, current market share and a host of things about which few CFOs have the time or inclination to study. The person in charge of finances and profitability has a role to play in determining price, but that discussion needs to be led by the marketer or someone else well-versed in all the areas that affect those prices and, ultimately, corporate profitability.

• A good marketing plan is both internally and externally focused in its determination of the company's appropriate competitive direction. Knowing market conditions is not enough. The marketing plan also must consider the company's abilities to meet those conditions profitably and on a sustained basis.

Knowing the market will support the sale of two million of the widgets you produce in the next two months does little good if your firm doesn't have the capacity to produce those widgets. Of course, you can always subcontract the work. But if the cost of manufacture, coupled with the necessary markup, does not produce the level of profitability desired or required, then it may be better to walk away from the business entirely. Without the proper internal focus to your marketing plan, that's an expensive lesson you could have learned the hard way.

• Finally, realize the marketing plan also provides the tools to measure the flow of your company's developmental steps and events. In the same way it offers a reflection of your company's business plan, the marketing plan creates a series of benchmarks by which to chart its developmental progress. If all goes well and your marketing succeeds beyond your wildest dreams, then the plan can stand almost as a stairway to that success, with each step identified with a component of that plan. More often than not, the plan will reflect a mix of hits and misses, each of which can be evaluated both by its success and by its role within the plan's strategic mix.

Source :
Michael Muckian, Prentice Hall's One-Day MBA in Marketing: A Complete Education for the Busy Professional , Prentice Hall.

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