Marketing Plans for Services: A Complete Guide, Third Edition

Chapter 11

Organizing for marketing planning

Introduction

From the foregoing chapters, it should be apparent that the decision to tackle marketing planning is not one that the service organization should take lightly. Taking up planning along the lines we have suggested will involve considerable time and effort being expended on a number of aspects of business activity which might earlier have been taken for granted and accepted uncritically. Although well-formulated marketing plans bring with them increased prospects for success, they are not achieved without cost. The forward-looking service organization recognizes this and is prepared to invest in the process, ensuring that the organization as a whole is geared up to supporting it. In these circumstances, marketing planning is identified as a critical planning activity and plays a key role in shaping organizational behaviour.

Undertaking marketing planning has profound organizational implications

Less far-seeing organizations perceive marketing planning as merely the imposition of a series of procedures which, if followed to the letter, deliver a plan at the end. It becomes a sort of ‘bolt-on’, optional extra. Such an unthinking, mechanical approach completely misses the point of having marketing planning.

Marketing planning is much more than a mechanical process

For it is not the marketing procedures that achieve success, but the creative thinking processes that they stimulate.

Planning can never be a neat, remote approach ...