TABLE OF CONTENTS While the commonsense nature of much of marketing should now be apparent from what has been covered to date, the broad scope and complexity of the process should be, too. Because of this, and because of the fact that marketing is central to the whole process of making an organization successful and profitable, an ad hoc approach is unlikely to maximize effectiveness.
Marketing must be clear about what it is trying to do. It must have a clear, logical and creative strategy that is effectively the route to achieving its objectives. This must be formalized in a plan, not least to specify what will be done (and not done), how, by whom and when. As the marketing activity predicated in the plan proceeds, and as time goes by, progress must be charted to ensure the right results are achieved progressively and that the organization both learns from what is happening and can act to fine-tune activity and performance.
The goal of the next part of the book is to illustrate the options presented by how marketing strategy can be approached and the principles upon which selecting strategies is carried out. Similarly, at the end of this part, readers should understand the essential principles of marketing planning, and also appreciate how the activity such a plan triggers is monitored to assess progress towards objectives and provide a basis for fine-tuning activity if matters do...
