Marketing Plans for Services: A Complete Guide, Third Edition

Chapter 9

Marketing planning Phase Four: resource allocation, monitoring and detailed planning (Part 1: the budget, the service product plan and the communications plan)

Chapter 8, on marketing strategy formulation, showed how the marketing audit information could be distilled and used to determine marketing objectives and strategies. Having these available to guide the thinking process, it was then possible to arrive at the services marketing mix, at a broad strategic level, which offered the best prospects for achieving the desired results. This chapter, which examines the final phase of the marketing planning process for services, will look first at the marketing budget and then at how the strategic marketing plan can be made operative through the allocation of resources and the formulation of a detailed first-year tactical marketing plan involving considerations of the services marketing mix at a detailed operational level. This chapter focuses on the service product plan and on the communications plan. Part 2, in Chapter 10, focuses on pricing, customer service, and monitoring and control.

Step 9 The marketing budget

In arriving at the best strategic marketing mix, all of the options under consideration had to be costed out. In that sense the broad strategic marketing budget is known already. However, it should now be developed in a more detailed and careful manner, as ...