Marketing Plans, 9th Edition

Marketing Planning: Yes, it really works!

Dr Stewart Barnes, Chief Executive Officer of QuoLux

Yes, it does work, but it needs senior leadership focus and drive from the top.*

Creating a market focused business plan is too important to be delegated down the organization. As Professor 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).¹

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 and 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 hundreds of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These companies are from various sectors operating in different countries facing ...