People and processes in marketing planning: The benefits of controlling implementation

Marketing planning is not new. Although being adopted increasingly by businesses of all types, it is still not utilized universally. As a process, though, marketing planning is often poorly facilitated and implementation of its recommendations is not always well directed or controlled. Managed thoughtfully and monitored, marketing planning has many benefits to offer a business, not least in enhancing managers’ understanding of marketing and markets, their motivation and their desire to communicate. This paper examines the barriers facing effective implementation of marketing plans as observed during many long‐term marketing planning initiatives. It proceeds to present a planning programme which overcomes many of the most common hurdles and leads to several additional benefits from marketing planning.