MARKETING PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT

Marketing Planning and Development



Marketing Planning and Development

1: Changing Perspectives in Marketing Planning

Q1a: Describe the Changing Perspectives in Marketing Planning?

Ans Q1a:

Since the late 1950s, a period of over half a century, the marketing discipline has been dominated by a paradigm that can be summed up in two words: micro and managerial. Most of the scholarly literature, the professionally oriented journals as well as textbooks approach marketing from the standpoint of a particular firm, organization, or market segment. Indeed, of the roughly 200 journals dealing with marketing issues (American Marketing Association, 2010), only one uses the term “macro” in its title and only a few others address marketing from a societal or public policy perspective (see, for example, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Journal of Macromarketing). (Marian, 2005)

As for textbooks, it has been several decades since anything with a macro view has been published (Narver and Savitt, 1971; Gist, 1974). Instead, just about everything published in the literature, explicitly or implicitly, conforms to what has now become the “classic” managerial marketing paradigm. Essentially, the entire field of marketing is viewed as a set of strategies on the supply side and a set of customers on the demand side. And, based on the underlying philosophy of “customer orientation,” “customer focus” or “customer centricity,” the roots of which emerged from the so-called “marketing concept” of the late 1950s (McKitterick, 1957), the strategies for any given firm on the supply side are supposed to conform to the desires of customers on the demand side. This micro/managerial vision of marketing was even given a nice tidy name - “the marketing mix” (Borden, 1964).

Q1b: Organization's Capability for Planning Its Future?

Ans Q1b:

Apparently adhering to the principle of parsimony, the core marketing strategies were limited to four strategies: product, pricing, promotion, and distribution. One astute textbook author noticing that the fourth marketing strategy started with a “d” instead of a “p” chose to change the term “distribution” to the term “place,” and hence the famous “four Ps” of the marketing mix was born (McCarthy, 1960). Now, the model was almost complete. Marketing is all about adjusting, blending, or better yet, “mixing” the four Ps into an optimum blend that would satisfy the needs and desires of customers. Further, this marketing mix model was not a static one. Rather, it was dynamic because over time, those responsible for mixing the marketing mix usually referred to as “marketing managers” would monitor their customers or “target market” through marketing research to ascertain their changing needs and desires. Then, these marketing managers would have the information needed to remix the marketing mix to reflect the changes desired by their target markets (McCarthy, 1960; Kotler, 1967; Borden, 1964). What could be simpler, or, as proponents of this paradigm would argue, more elegant? Marketing is what firms do to find out what people want and then in turn how firms can develop the right mix of the products customers want, the prices they are willing to pay, the promotional messages they ...