Eureka - Building a Marketing Plan

Building a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan helps a business understand its market & provides a strategy for achieving a predetermined set of performance objectives. The main benefit of designing a marketing plan is that it helps us to identify opportunities, leverage core capabilities, have a focussed market strategy & resource allocation process. The first part of building the plan is doing the situation analysis of the market and business with respect to current market forces, competitive position of the business and its current performance. The second part involves SWOT analysis to capture all the present and possible future influences on performance. Output of the situation analysis is a marketing strategy. The next step is designing a strategic market plan that would guide the development of a marketing mix strategy. The plan is specified for each product or market in the portfolio & provides a direction for achieving share objectives, future positioning and investment. Further, the marketing mix strategy is developed to put the plan into action. This involves having the product positioning strategy, channel strategy and communications strategy. The final lap involves designing the revenue plan and marketing budget & finally developing the profit plan. Post all this performance review is done that involves monitoring of marketing and profit performance in light of the marketing plan’s timeline.

In the Cottle-taylor case, the primary question was whether increasing the advertising expenses would lead to higher revenues and profitability. The company could have developed a marketing plan to understand what was possibly achievable with the increased ad dollars and whether the company was happy with the expected returns. This would have helped the company to take the decision of whether to go for the increased advertising budget or not and in case they did wish to increase the budget, it would have laid out a well structured plan to achieve the target.