This chapter starts with the following
quotation from Dwight D. Eisenhower - ”plans are nothing; planning is
everything”.
From my working experience I must say that
I fully endorse this statement – running a successful business has nothing to
do with producing a nice looking plan – it must be all about the thinking
behind the strategy.
Having said that, the planning is nothing
if the implementation is not carried out effectively.
Like many of us working as a consultant, we
are too familiar with business & marketing plans that do not join up the
thinking and provide a thread from the objectives right the way through to the implementation
of the strategy. Many plans go a long way to say what they are planning to
achieve and why they believe it is possible but fail to get to grips with the
analysis of the market to provide the most effective strategy for the business.
When I read a business & marketing
plan, one of the judgments I make is how confident I feel that the plan will be
implemented and will achieve the stated objectives. If this confidence is
missing, it’s normally because the plan has failed to convince me that the
market opportunity for growth has been fully understood and then the implementation
of the plan falls down on the level of detail.
I recently read a plan for a charity that
is looking top raise a lot of money to set up medical healthcare facilities in
a third world country. The plan very clearly provided details of the current status
and where they wanted to get to in a given time period. The plan went on to
spell out in detail exactly what will be required, where the new resources will
come from and how they will be recruited and then used in the country. The plan
included a detailed budget to show where the money would be spent.
When I was at Bass back in the 1980’s, my
brand plan had to support the growth objectives and I remember including
details about exactly where I believed market share gains would come from,
which brand would lose share and how we would steal their share. Without this
level of detail, my brand plan would not have been approved and the budget
would not have been available for me to spend. The Bass Board needed to have a
high degree of confidence, that the money being spent would return on their
investment.
Phil Kotler says that to plan effectively,
marketers must understand the key relationship between types of marketing-mix
expenditures and their sales & profit consequences.
In today’s marketplace, this is still very
much the case. Philip Kotler goes into great detail in this chapter and shows
us how we can create an effective marketing plan that will support the
rationale behind the strategy and the planned marketing-mix expenditure to
generate the required sales & profits, i.e. the objectives of the business.
In 2013, this level of detail is even more
important if businesses are going to plan their way to success.
