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Marketing plans how to prepare them, how to use them

A practical, research-grounded guide that demystifies marketing planning by teaching managers how to prepare and use strategic and tactical marketing plans that match company capabilities to customer wants in order to create sustainable competitive advantage.

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What it’s about

Based on extensive research into the marketing planning practices of industrial, consumer, and service companies, this book strips away the confusion and mythology surrounding marketing planning. Malcolm McDonald shows that most companies that think they are planning are merely forecasting and budgeting, and suffer grave operational consequences as a result. The book takes the reader painstakingly through the entire process: understanding the marketing concept, conducting a marketing audit, performing SWOT and portfolio analyses, setting marketing objectives and strategies, building advertising, sales, pricing and distribution plans, and finally designing and implementing a simple, step-by-step marketing planning system. Crucially, it deals not only with what should happen but with what goes wrong—the cultural, organizational, and political barriers to planning—and how to overcome them. It combines current best practice with the necessary theoretical background, making it equally valuable to practising marketing directors and to students preparing for professional marketing qualifications.

The through-line

Who it’s for: A practising manager or marketing executive responsible for a company's revenue-earning activities who wants to prepare and use an effective marketing plan that secures profitable growth and competitive advantage.
The problem: Their company is only forecasting and budgeting rather than truly planning, leaving them unable to match capabilities to market opportunities or to know what to sell and to whom. They feel baffled, frustrated, and confused by a complex, jargon-laden subject where confusion 'reigns supreme' and little practical guidance exists.
The plan: Understand the marketing concept and the marketing mix.
Carry out a thorough, structured marketing audit and summarize it as focused SWOT analyses.
Analyze customers, markets, and products using segmentation, life cycles, and portfolio matrices.
Set quantified marketing objectives about products and markets, and develop matching strategies.
Build supporting communication, pricing, and distribution plans.
The payoff: The reader's life looks like running a company firmly in control of its diverse activities, with widely understood objectives, motivated employees, actionable market information, minimal waste, and regained profitability and confidence.

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Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind · Al Ries and Jack Trout
Referenced in the textbook as a foundational work on the concept of brand positioning, a core topic of marketing strategy.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference · Malcolm Gladwell
The book's concepts of 'Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen' are discussed as a way to understand how ideas and trends spread through social networks, relevant to word-of-mouth and viral marketing.
The Long Tail · Chris Anderson
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Blue Ocean Strategy · W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
The book explicitly references and explains this strategic framework for creating 'uncontested market spaces,' presenting it as an alternative to head-to-head competition.
Marketing in the Service Sector · John M. Rathmell
Cited frequently throughout the book as a foundational text that helped establish services marketing as a distinct field of study in the 1970s.
Breaking Free from Product Marketing · G. Lynn Shostack
This seminal 1977 'Journal of Marketing' article is referenced by many authors in the proceedings for its powerful argument that services require a fundamentally different marketing approach and for introducing conceptual tools like 'molecular modeling'.
The Marketing of Professional Services · Aubrey Wilson
This 1972 book is cited as a pioneering work specifically addressing the unique challenges of marketing for professionals like consultants, recognizing that the 'product' is often inseparable from the provider.
Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations · Philip Kotler
This book is referenced as the key text that extended marketing thought to the nonprofit sector, providing the theoretical underpinnings for many of the papers in the book's nonprofit track.