Marketing communication: principles and practice

THE PLANNING PROCESS
Intellectually, the planning of resource deployment in an effort to accomplish
desirable objectives is sensible. So why do so many managers not manage (by
manage, I mean proactively pursue appropriate objectives by deciding how
to acquire and use resources)? All too often, marketing communication
practice is overly determined by the initiatives of media sales people. 
The most basic planning mechanism is an annual plan that describes the
objectives that the provider intends to accomplish in the coming year and
the budget required to realize these objectives. The annual marketing plan
is the mechanism by which the objectives, activities, and budgets for the
product development, advertising, sales promotion, and sales and distribution
programmes are 
integrated
.
The plan serves three basic purposes:
1 Like the various programme plans, annual plans serve as a communication
device. They indicate clearly to the personnel involved in marketing what
the planned objectives and programmes are, and thus should provide
guidance on what activities to pursue.
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2 In an organization with a range of products, markets, or other divisions,
annual plans serve as important inputs to the resource allocation process.
Top management usually will review each annual plan within an organi-
zation, assess the corporate resources available, and approve or modify
budgets based on an assessment of each unit’s needs and contributions.
3 Finally, once approved, the annual plan serves as a mechanism for control.
The annual plan establishes standards of performance against which the
organization’s units’ progress can be evaluated. Periodic checks of the gap
between actual and planned performance can be useful in making timely
modifications to the plan. The overall achievement of the unit is assessed
largely on annual performance relative to the plan.
Depending on the diversity of the provider’s products and markets and the
organization of the corporation, it may be necessary to write a number of
plans of varying scope and level:
• business level annual marketing plan
• annual product or department plan
• annual sales plan
We can identify five purposes of the operational marketing plan:
1 to explain the marketing situation now and that expected in the plan period
2 to specify the results expected so that the corporation can anticipate what
their situation will be at the end of the plan period
3 to identify the resources needed to carry out the planned actions
4 to describe the actions that are to take place so that responsibility for
implementation can be assigned
5 to permit monitoring of the ensuing actions and results
Planning in marketing communication, as in public relations, and especially
in advertising, is synonymous with research-based strategy-making. In
marketing, the value-creating system should be driven by managers’
understanding of the product–market–media relationships. Knowledge and
information are essential inputs to strategy-making and action-taking. 
Marketing planners have some key questions to answer:
• Who are the people we want as our customers?
• What do they need?
• How can we make it, and profit by this activity?
• How do we tell them?
• How do we deliver it?
• How do we keep ourselves, and them, up to date?
Today, marketing is ever more about service as well as production. Staff have
to have answers for customers. As Kevin Gavaghan (1993) said, we cannot
afford to be the ‘I dunno’ society.