Marketing Plans, 8th Edition

Marketing Planning: Yes, it really works! Experiences from the real world

STEWART BARNES, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF QUOLUX

Yes, it does work, but it needs senior management focus and drive from the top.¹

Creating a market-focused business plan is too important to be delegated down the organization. As McDonald notes, ‘The top 50 USA corporations lose $50 billion a year through failed strategy implementation, i.e. poor leadership. Without effective leadership, even the most outstanding growth strategies will fail’ (Barnes et al., 2015).

So, there is the challenge.

If you truly wish to transform your company into a high-performing business, then a game-changing activity that is critical to shape the destiny of your leadership and your company is to understand where your sales and profits come from, segment your market, build strategies for the segments you choose to compete in, then align your operations to deliver the value that customers seek. You then must do that consistently over a period of time.

I first met Malcolm in the mid-1990s and was exposed to the Strategic Marketing Planning (SMP) process which I refer to as MPP – Marketing Planning Process. Impressed by its rigour and robustness, I used it successfully in Pilkington, across a family-owned group of companies in many European countries, and more recently in my own company, QuoLux, taking it into dozens of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These are from various sectors operating in different countries facing ...