Critical Review of the Current Issues Facing Academia or Practitioners, Answering the Dilemma: Planning Is Neither Within the Grasps of Contemporary Marketers, nor a Realistic Possibility?

Individually, write a critical review of the current issues facing academia or practitioners, answering the dilemma: Planning is neither within the grasps of contemporary marketers, nor a realistic possibility? Include within the report a short personal account (300 words max) of how the review changed or strengthened your understanding of the relevance of planning (2500 words)

Introduction

In the twenty-first century, global economic conditions create incentives for new market entry and expansion strategies, the environmental factors affecting these strategies become more and more complex with intense completive pressures and the speed of technological change. All companies need strategies to meet changing markets. No one strategy is best for all companies. The managers typically feel that the pace of technological change and the speed of global communications mean more and faster change now than ever before (Johnson and Scholes, 2002). As the environment changes, so businesses must adapt in order to maintain strategic fit between their capabilities and the marketplace (Jobber, 2004). In cope with the environmental pressures on the company and managing the resources at its disposal and their complex interplay, a clear sense of direction is invaluable (Cannon, 1998). Therefore marketing planning is more and more essential to provides both the vision and the direction for the company.

Marketing planning is a systematic process that involves assessing marketing opportunities and resources, determining marketing objectives, recommending valid marketing strategy, developing a detailed marketing mix programmes designed to implement the specified marketing strategy, and scheduling and costing out the actions necessary for implementation (Dibb, et al, 2001). The role of marketing planning would be to ensure that the marketing mix for the product matches changing customer needs, as well as seeking opportunities to use the companies’ strengths to market other products in new markets (Jobber, 2004).

The purpose of this report is to explore whether the marketing planning is just a waste of time and very uncertainty work. It is discussed with some current issues to explain the important of the marketing planning, the strategic planning process and planning maybe is either forecasting some potential factors or maybe is unpredictable factors, such as erewhile tsunami in south Asia lead to many unpredictable factors for the local and global market.

The important of make planning

The formal planning yields benefits for all types of company, large and small, new and mature. It forces the company to sharpen its objectives and policies, leads to better coordination of company efforts, and provides clearer performance standards for control (Kotler, et al, 2001). There are many studies which identify a wide range of benefits to be obtained from marketing planning. The benefits can be classified as relating to the development, coordination and control of marketing activity.

First of all, marketing planning helps a business to analyse environment, identify available options and expected developments, allocate resources and make appropriate decisions (Dibb, et al, 2001). Besides that planning avail to provide a clear sense of direction for the business, available resources can be better matched to opportunities, and increase organizational preparedness to change. This can ensure that progress towards pre-defined objectives is monitored and maintained (Jobber, 2004). .

Secondly, marketing planning also assists business to specify exactly what is expected, integrate different areas, communicates objectives and plans to the staff and reduce internal rivalry, which planning avail to minimize irrational responses to the unexpected things, improve communications among executives, reduce conflicts about where the company should be going and improve the internal working relationships (Brassington and Pettitt, 2003).

Thirdly, marketing planning provides a framework for the continuing review of operations. It ensures that targets are achieved, provides early warning of anything which goes wrong and allows corrective measures to be taken soon (Johnson and Scholes, 2002).

The problem of planning in current environment

However, there can be little doubt that marketing planning is essential when we consider the increasingly hostile and complex environment in which companies operate. The formal planning is less useful in a fast-changing environment makes little sense. Therefore many managers resist spend too much time to prepare a written plan, they normally use sound planning helps the company to anticipate and respond quickly to environmental changes, and to prepare better for sudden developments. For example, such planning could have helped Carrefour, Europe’s largest retailer, avoid their share price collapse after they were first dismissive of the impact of the internet on their business and then announced a vague, €1 billion e-commerce strategy (Kotler, et al, 2005). Besides, that, according to McDonald's study, he discovered that 90 percent of the industrial goods companies did no practise the kinds of systematic planning procedure and, the highest estimate of companies getting marketing planning right was 25 per cent in six other studies in American, British and Australian universities, while those companies that do not engage in formalized planning sometimes do well (Mcdonald, 2002).

Failing to plan means planning to fail (Kotler, 1999). These problems included there are often being little or no marketing analysis undertaken as part of any marketing planning. Poor marketing intelligence, poor internal communications, inadequate senior management support, failure to involve non-marketers, little lateral thinking, plus the planning process itself often failing to feed analysis into any strategic thinking and linking these strategic decisions to the resulting tactical sales and marketing programme. While some of these deficiencies related to the planning process itself, many stemmed from an ineffectual organization of the planning activity and a failure to develop the necessary internal relationships (Simkin, 2002).

Traditionally, planning has been based on the assumption that the future is predictable as an extrapolation of the past and present. In the face of a radically different future, many organisations will find that doing more with the same or doing it better will not suffice. (Blanken and Liff, 1999, pp. 97-98). The planning is unpredictable for the future. Therefore, there are many ways in which the process can go wrong. For example, Most companies plan, using a combination of forecasting and budgeting systems. These tend to project