Chapter 6
Marketing planning Phase Two: the situation review (Part 1)
Once again, we should like to emphasize the difference between the process of strategic marketing planning described here and the output of this process, the strategic marketing plan. What should appear in the written output of the strategic marketing planning process was shown in Figure 4.5 in Chapter 4. In the figure above, we have added a box in the top right-hand corner to emphasize the difference between the process and the output, i.e. the strategic marketing plan.
In this chapter, we will consider in some detail the component steps of Phase Two of the marketing planning process – the situation review. We will look at ways of tackling each of these process steps. In particular, this chapter focuses on market segmentation while Chapter 7 (Part 2) focuses on other tools such as positioning, lifecycle analysis and portfolio management that service companies can use in their situation review.
Once again, we must stress that, for the purposes of clarity, we deal with each of the steps in Phase Two in a linear sequence. In reality, they are highly interactive and far less obvious as ‘stand-alone’ activities.
While the purpose of the previous chapter, the corporate strategic context, was to provide marketing planning with a sense of strategic direction, the situation review is concerned with evaluating the ...
