B O O K S
Should a training institution have a marketing plan? Who is qualified to write it? You are...with the help of "The Marketing Plan. How to Prepare and Implement It" written by William M. Luther, published in its second edition in 1992 by AMACOM, a division of American Management Association. The author has been a consultant, lecturer, and writer on management and marketing for more than twenty years. He has conducted hundreds of seminars and has helped companies of all sizes to develop business and marketing plans.The purpose of the book is to take you through the development of a marketing plan. Not the type of marketing plan that numbers 250 pages. Not one that you write once a year and then put on your shelf for the rest of the year. (Does that sound familiar?) No, this marketing plan, when completed, has fewer than ten pages and is read and approved by management before a penny is spent on marketing. It contains measurable objectives so you know whether you are achieving your goals.
You will learn that the completed plan is operational rather than an exercise. It provides specific direction for the five components of marketing: product/service, marketing communications (advertising, sales promotion, and public relations), market research, customer service, and sales management. If you don't include all five areas of marketing, Bill Luther says, you have an incomplete plan. If personnel from each of the above areas don't write the plan in unity, poor coordination and improper selection and use of available marketing tools will be the likely result.
As you implement the plan, you may realize that some of your objectives are too high or too low or that one or more strategies and plans are ineffective. If so, you don't wait until the end of the planning year to change your plan; otherwise you lose both time and money.
This book will not solve all your problems, but it will give you direction on how to set your objectives and develop your strategies and plans. As Mr. Luther explains, most people spend most of their time trying to determine what to do and the few remaining hours on how to do it. The problem here is that execution is actually the most difficult and time-consuming ingredient. The answer is the development of a tight plan that takes fewer than thirty days to complete, leaving at least 335 days for execution.
The book is divided into seven sections. Section I begins with a chapter on strategic planning, which sets the direction for all subsequent plans, including the marketing plan. A marketing plan simply cannot be drawn up until the strategic plan has been articulated. Not only will you probably be out of business in ten years if your organization doesn't have a strategic plan, but in the interim, you could be allocating your resources to the wrong products or services. The next two chapters of Section I deal with marketing personnel, their tasks and relationship to other departments within an organization, and with advertising agencies: how to select, work with, and compensate the right one. Chapter four covers the fact book, the document that determines the soundness of your marketing plan. If you have an extensive and accurate fact book, you should end up with a meaningful plan. If your fact book is incomplete and contains a bunch of guesses, you will end up with a lousy plan.
Section II recommends what information should be part of the product/service plan, including pricing strategy; packaging; number of sizes, shapes, and colors; estimated awareness and preference levels; and distribution.
Section III contains five chapters devoted to the development of your marketing communications plan, which includes the advertising plan, public relations plan, and sales promotion plan. Here the book sets out ways to determine what information should be in your basic selling line, which advertising vehicles you should use to get the story out, and how to prepare the message. Following chapters discuss one of the most underused marketing tools - public relations - underlining the many opportunities in this area, and the sales promotion plan, with an enlightening explanation of advantages and disadvantages of ten different types of sales promotion.
Section IV talks about the research: market research and communications research. Market research will answer five critical questions: Who are your customers; what do they want; what does the competition offer; what can you offer; and what do customers think you offer? Communications research will tell you whether your communications are working.
Section V focuses on customer relations. The value of customer relations is that it costs less than half to keep a customer than it does to acquire a new one. Examples of well-known companies are included. Section VI offers practical recommendations on how to manage your sales force, and discusses the requirements of an effective sales presentation. Section VII ties together the five marketing components of marketing by including a recommended marketing plan format, with examples of objectives, strategies, and plans for each area.
In short, it's a great book!