Malcolm McDonald - Marketing Plans 8e: How to Prepare Them, How to Profit from Them

This edition first published 2016
2016 Malcolm McDonald and Hugh Wilson
Fifth edition published 2002, sixth edition published 2007, both by Elsevier Ltd, seventh edition published
2011 by John Wiley and Sons, Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McDonald, Malcolm, author. | Wilson, Hugh, author.
Title: Marketing plans: how to prepare them, how to profit from them /
Malcolm McDonald, Hugh Wilson.
Description: Eighth Edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2016. | Revised edition of the authors' Marketing plans,
2011. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016022150| ISBN 9781119217138 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781119217183
(Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119217176 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: MarketingManagement. | MarketingPlanning.
Classification: LCC HF5415.13 .M255 2016 | DDC 658.8/02dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022150

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-119-21713-8 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-119-21718-3 (ebk)
ISBN 978-1-119-21717-6 (ebk) ISBN 978-1-119-30989-5 (ebk)

Cover design: Wiley
Cover images: Petar Ivanov Ishmiriev/Shutterstock

Please read this as it contains important information about this book.

The importance of marketing planning is demonstrated by the half million copies of this book that have been sold in English and many other languages since it was first published in 1984.

Since the book's launch, it has helped and encouraged hundreds of thousands of practising managers with the difficult task of marketing planning. Many of them have been kind enough to write expressing their thanks for the book's practical, no-nonsense style and approach to the subject. This has encouraged the first author, Malcolm McDonald, to update the book continually in previous editions, and after the sixth edition, to ask his esteemed colleague Professor Hugh Wilson to join him as co-author. Originally a computer scientist, Hugh brings to the book deep experience in the latest thinking on marketing in a digital world, including integrated marketing communications, e-commerce, multichannel strategy and customer relationship management (CRM). The authors have been working together on how to evolve marketing planning in a digital world for over 20 years.

The purpose of this book is quite simply to explain and demonstrate how to prepare and use a marketing plan. It is equally relevant for consumer, service and industrial goods companies, as well as not-for-profit organizations, since the process is universal.

It is based on our research into the marketing planning practices of industrial, service and retail companies, which has revealed marketing planning as an area of major weakness. Almost without exception, companies that thought they were planning were in fact only forecasting and budgeting, and suffered grave operational difficulties as a result. The problem, as companies face up to the opportunities and challenges of the twenty-first century is not that the philosophy of marketing is not believed; rather it is that most companies, particularly industrial goods companies and many service organizations, have difficulty in making it work.

This is largely because of ignorance about the process of planning their marketing activities, for which little help is provided in the extant body of literature. Books or articles often turn out to be about the management of the several elements of the marketing mix rather than about the process of combining them into a coherent plan. Others treat marketing planning in such a generalized way that it is difficult to distil from them any guidance of operational significance. Finally, there are many excellent papers about individual aspects of the marketing planning process.

The truth is, of course, that the actual process of marketing planning is simple in outline. Any book will tell us that it consists of: a situation review; assumptions; objectives; strategies; programmes; and measurement and review. What other books do not tell us is that there are a number of contextual issues that have to be considered that make marketing planning one of the most baffling of all management problems.

Here are some of those issues:

• When should it be done, how often, by whom and how?
• Is it different in a large and a small company?
• Is it different in a diversified and an undiversified company?
• Is it different in an international and a domestic company?
• What is the role of the chief executive?
• What is the role of the marketing department? Who else needs to be involved, and how?
• Should marketing planning be top-down or bottom-up?
• What is the relationship between operational (one year) and strategic (longer-term) planning?

Since effective marketing planning lies at the heart of a company's revenue-earning activities, it is not surprising that there is a great demand for a guide which strips away the confusion and mystery surrounding this subject and helps firms to get to grips with it in a practical and down-to-earth manner.

This book explains what marketing is, how the marketing planning process works, how to carry out a marketing audit, how to set marketing objectives and strategies, how to schedule and cost out what has to be done to achieve the objectives, and how to design and implement a simple marketing planning system.