Creating a Marketing Plan – How It Has Transformed And Evolved

What is a marketing plan? Through this brief article I would like to articulate in short on how the process of analyzing and building a marketing plan and the concept of marketing management has evolved over a period of time. From my own research and business, I can say that marketing is the job to plan, create, communicate and deliver value to a target market at a profit. It is a business law and objective for all the entrepreneurs and also for the small, medium, large organizations and corporate. This holds true both for online as well as offline businesses.

Now let’s take this opportunity to discuss in detail, create, communicate and deliver. Creating value for the customers is called product management. Your product may be a service, tangible or intangible, but when you communicate value it’s called Branding and that’s brand management. There is a significant difference between product management and brand management. You could have five products, but what have you done to brand them, communicate excitement, differentiate them and lastly to deliver value. Thus is called customers management.

So according to the traditional business plans, the organizations used to run 3 businesses within one. They were:
A) Product Management
B) Brand Management
C) Customer Management

Progression Of Product Management In The New Marketing Plan

The business practice of product management was really like the independent business, it was like you have a company and from the inside you develop things and then ask your sales & marketing people to get rid of them. You do it internally, you do it with your own scientists and engineers, so what is strategically changing in product management today? Let’s take the example of Procter and Gamble (P&G), one of the largest FMCG company globally, the company not only has its own scientists and research team who are developing new products for them, but they have also connected with twenty times as many researches and scientists outside. Quite expectedly, the old idea was to do things secretly and protect the vital information. It was as if you were inventing something which the competitor with the likes of Unilever should not know about. it’s called the closed door policy. But now Procter & Gamble’s recent strategic and business planning is to tap resources and take service of scientists, researchers, analysts, anywhere in the world, at any price, who they believe have solutions to the problem that Procter & Gamble wants to solve.

Take a real time example, P & G makes a potato chips product called Pringles. They decided to print amusing and funny things on this popular product, but the big question the management faced was – how do you print this picture or a funny slogan on the product. Their in-house resources could not figure it out until they found and later took assistance from a cookie maker in Italy, who had been printing similar things in his hometown. This process is called open technology, open innovation. The key objective is to find the best ideas irrespective of where they come from. The new normal is to open product management.

Brand Management An Essential Ingredient For The Right Marketing Plan..

What is right brand management? Most of us believe that there are few functions within marketing which are sexy, such as branding focusing on flamboyance and exuberance, but in reality, it is anything but that. Earlier, brand building used to heavily revolve around packaging, a name or at the maximum was limited to a logo, but today as one can easily understand, marketing energy is spent mostly on “what you are all about”. Brand management today means to fulfill a promise, the brand inspires everything you do, the way you act when you approach and reach to the customers and the whole process is emotional, highly emotional, there is a new direction.

The traditional formula was, “I am going after your mind, I am going after your heart, I want mind share and I want heart share”. Nowadays marketers are saying that they also want spirit share. They care more for the soul than the bread. Share of something little more than narrow to your own financial and business interest. We might be affirmed that its civic, its caring and we want to be appreciated because we care about the shape of the world and that’s corporate social responsibility but in creating an emotional relationship its more than limited to the person’s own nurturing of his or her own ego.

Role Of Customer Management As A Powerful Marketing Plan
Nowadays, customer management has also changed, do you think you are doing customer management if you essentially have a database of customers and you are reaching them through direct means i.e. through online, email, phone calls and so on. Is that really customer relation management or dealing with a database? I think, plain enough, it requires an honest reflection. What is new about customer relationship management is that marketers want to meet the customers on a regular basis and know them really well beyond the database. Infact we want to get their help, to get the customers help for creating new refined products, we want to co-create with our customer, our products, we want their help in creating advertisements for us. It is but natural that the good thing about working with customers is that you have them on your side.

Be Prepared To Adopt The Change

So, all the future entrepreneurs, marketers, corporate managers, I rise to express on behalf of myself and other experiences marketers with whom I am associated with, that be prepared to embrace the change in the way newmarketing plans are written and execute to take best advantage of it. As famous saying goes “If you are prepared to welcome the unknown, you already know the secret of remaining victorious in all defeats and failures”. Be prepared to go that extra mile from where unsuccessful people chose to return. Be prepared for the radical change.

By Tarun Gupta