The Marketing Plan

William Luther

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814416945
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing digitale
• Index: Business

The rules for creating a knock-out marketing plan have completely changed. With the advent of digital business strategies, it may seem like you need to start from scratch. In his trusted classic, now completely updated to reflect the latest changes in digital marketing, Bill Luther shows readers how to navigate this perilous landscape while staying true to your current marketing strategy and the tools that work best for your business. With answers to important marketing questions in each chapter, readers will identify their marketing objectives and deploy specific strategies for every stage of the marketing cycle--from competitive and market analysis to planning, budgeting, brand development, and management. The up-to-the-minute fourth edition of The Marketing Plan pairs case studies and examples from major brand successes of the last ten years with access to online software that aids in decision-making, pricing, budget calculations, and sales projections--providing everything you need to produce an impressive and professional marketing plan.

1 The Planning Process

Someone (I’d love to give proper credit, but don’t know to whom) described the anatomy of a business shown in Figure 1–1 below:

Figure 1–1 Anatomy of a business.

I’m hoping this book will add a few things upstairs and strength your muscles.

A Strategic Plan Is Your First Order of Business

Any planning for a business should start with a strategic plan. A strategic plan is a long-range plan, but not all long-range plans are strategic. In strategic planning you start with an analysis of the markets relative to what you are doing now and you attempt to determine what you could be doing in the future for maximum profitability.

First, of course, you must determine your market. A market is a group of potential or current customers that have a similar need or desire—or what you believe they will want or need—and share a common group of competitors, distribution channels, and packaging.

You need only look out the window to see the markets passing by. If Microsoft had been looking out the window, it would have entered the search engine business years ago, long before Google got so strong. Microsoft made a failed attempt to purchase Yahoo! and is attempting to play catch-up by introducing its own search engine, Bing. Not there yet: its recent market share (summer 2010) of all U.S. search engines, according to comScore, was only 13.6 percent versus Yahoo at 20.1 percent and Google at 61.6 percent.

Conversely, Cisco, the worldwide leader in networking, has made four major acquisitions in 2009, including Norway’s Tandberg, which is in the video conferencing market.

You should not confuse strategic planning with Six Sigma. Six Sigma is a business management strategy that can help you improve your bottom line. It seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects and variability in manufacturing and business processes. That’s great, but Six Sigma should only be used after you decide which way you are headed in the future. Your strategic planning process should lead you to determine where you can make good money by increasing the value or cutting price in a current or future strength area in which the competition is least apt to follow.

My interpretation of the phrase “looking out the window” is shown in Figure 1–2 below.

Figure 1–2 Innovation.

There are three “windows” you should be looking out of. The first involves the present customer groups and I recommend that it account for about half of your efforts. The second involves adjacent markets, from which you hope to acquire new customer groups. That is, you are innovating in a business area adjacent to your core business. This should account for about 30 percent of your efforts. The third thing you should be looking for is entirely new markets, where you are expanding outside of your core business. I recommend that this activity account for about 20 percent of your resources.

Examples of the second strategy are MillerCoors LLC testing the sale of $20.00 draft beer systems for consumers to drink at home, PepsiCo purchasing independent soft drink bottlers, and Oracle purchasing Sun Microsystems. Examples of the third strategy are DuPont going from textiles to science-based industries and the San Francisco Examiner going on YouTube.

Unlike many other consultants, I believe that the strategic plan should not be developed by just the board of directors and top management, but that managers and line personnel should also be included. For example, when you analyze markets, you should determine what the customers want, what are the benefits that turn them on—and no one can do that better than your marketing team. That is why the marketing plan, as well as other business component plans, should be developed alongside of the strategic plan.

According to Ted Mininni, president of Design Force, Inc.:

For brands to be truly resonant, new thinking must permeate the entire company from top to bottom. Today’s successful brands must:

• Be disruptive and creative. OXO has redesigned the most mundane of objects like the measuring cup and vegetable peeler in a whole new way to make it easier for everyone, especially aging and handicapped people, to easily execute household chores, creating strong brand adherents.

• Generate excitement. The master at this, Apple, built buzz around the imminent launch of its new, long-awaited iPad . . . ambitiously stating the company is going to carve out a new product category—yet again!

• Entertain. Unilever’s Axe brand of grooming products ingeniously aims at a young men’s market by focusing on building a brand that ensures positive experiences between them and young females in a modern version of the Dating Game.

• Engage. Crayola continues to engage even today’s high-tech kids. By moving away from its former branding as an art supply company to a provider of childhood creativity, the brand remains vibrant and relevant.

• Add convenience to consumers’ lives. Staples Easy button infers home offices and businesses will easily find the products they need; enjoy expert service, advice, and substantive help like computer repair service. Simple, direct, effective branding. . . .

But here’s an important point: brands can’t simply launch one exciting concept and then sit back. They have to continue to create excitement. If that sounds tough—not every company can be like Apple right?—it may not be as hard as it sounds. Creativity and innovation feeds on itself and brands can borrow a page from companies that are far smaller than Apple or Google.¹

For more information on how to develop your strategic plan, go to my website (www.wml-marketing.com) and examine the software I have for sale.

Beyond the Strategic Plan

After the strategic plan comes the business plan. The strategic plan should project the company five to ten years into the future and the business plan executes the strategic plan in more detail for the first two or three years. The business plan encompasses the entire business and includes information about the various components of the business, including marketing.

The third level of plans are the individual plans for the various components, such as the marketing, sales, and pricing plans, that are the greatest in detail and usually have a time period of one year.

In examining your markets, you want to determine what benefits your product/service can or will offer to the customer. Figure 1–3 shows an ad for a law firm in New York with the headline, “Flemming Zulack Williamson Zauderer LLP.” Now, if the market is individuals looking for a law firm to hire, would that headline turn them on?

Figure 1–3 Law firm.

I don’t think so.

Figure 1–4 Mandarin Oriental, The Hotel Group.

Figure 1–4 shows an ad for Mandarin Oriental, The Hotel Group. It doesn’t really have a headline unless you are referring to the words, “He’s a fan.” In the small type below the picture it tells you that the name of the person sitting in the chair is Dennis Hopper and provides a URL “to find out why [he’s] a fan. . .”

Even if the celebrity shown were Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal rolled into one, would this endorsement provide those looking for a hotel a reason for staying at this one? If it doesn’t find customers, it’s worthless.

Now compare those two ads with the one shown in Figure 1–5 for Poise Ultra Thins. The headline reads, “When a giggle turns into a leak, turn to a more absorbent pad.” If the market is incontinent women, I believe they definitely would want to know more about this product.

Figure 1–5 Poise Ultra Thins.

When it leaves the factory, it’s lipstick; when it’s opened by the customer, it’s hope.

In marketing, you always want to lead with a benefit to the customer, whether it’s an ad, sales call, brochure, or trade show. You then support the benefit with the features of your product/service. Fitness centers advertise that their service will build body tone and help you lose weight. That may be true, but those are features. The main reason individuals go to work out is to look more attractive. That’s the benefit. Many company brochures I see have a very attractive photograph of the corporate headquarters on the cover. I could never figure out why, because they are not trying to sell their building. If, for example, you are a manufacturer of torsion bar springs for automobiles, please don’t show your plant on the brochure cover. Don’t even list the features of the product, such as greater storage of energy per pound. Put that on the inside of the brochure to support the benefit. On the cover you want the benefit of less weight and smaller space to increase mileage and provide more room in the automobile. You want the reader to turn the cover of the brochure, so give her a reason for going inside the brochure. Chapter 4 will be devoted to analyzing the customer.

The Fact Book, Objectives and Strategies, and Action Plans

The fact book may be the single most important “product” of your work with this book. It is the fact book that drives your marketing plan, just as the strategic plan drives which markets you should be participating in. Most of the data you insert into the various software modules we provide belong in your fact book (you have downloaded them already, haven’t you?).

The objectives and strategies you write for each marketing component, based on the data you insert into the fact book, belong in your marketing plan. These are included as worksheets at the end of the appropriate chapters, and they are provided as Word files in the software package you have downloaded, in a folder called “Worksheets.” As mentioned in the Introduction, the fact book may number over a hundred pages while the marketing plan should be no longer than twenty. That way you can keep your marketing plan on the top of your desk so you can monitor it weekly, with the fact book on your shelf for easy access and confirmation of your marketing plan. Many times when I was asked to review a company’s marketing program, they would hand me a plan that numbered over a hundred pages. They would have a couple of meetings preparing the plan and then put it on the shelf until the following year, with no one looking at it until then. I always told them to be effective in marketing, they would have to change their planning procedure.

In addition to your fact book and marketing plan, you need action plans. Action plans provide the details of how you are going to execute your strategies and achieve your objectives. Action plans should be written and monitored by the individuals responsible for their execution. They, too, belong on the top of the desk of those executing these details.

All of your objectives should be measurable. I have been shown many plans that were just a bunch of generalities. A complete waste of time. If you can’t measure your objectives, don’t write them. For example, if you are using advertising, you may want to insert an awareness level you hope to achieve in your advertising plan objectives. Then you measure it and if you are off target, you should change your plan. In your sales plan, you may want to insert a closing level you hope to obtain. Once again you measure it and if you are not making it, you should make changes. You can write measurable objectives for every part of your plan. You will need research to measure some of them and Chapter 17 will show you where to find what you need.

The various components of the marketing plan will be discussed in detail in subsequent chapters. The product/service plan defines your brand. You use your advertising plan to build awareness, your direct mail plan to sell or produce leads, and your trade show plan to demonstrate what you are selling. The sales promotion plan should be used for incremental sales and the public relations plan for free ads. The Internet plan can give you instan...