Strategic marketing planning: theory and practice 91
Where marketing planning has failed, it
has generally been because companies have
placed too much emphasis on the procedures
themselves and the resulting paperwork, rather
than on generating information useful to and
consumable by management. But more about
reasons for failure later. For now, let us look at
the marketing planning process in more detail,
starting with the marketing audit.
What is a marketing audit?
Any plan will only be as good as the informa-
tion on which it is based, and the marketing
audit is the means by which information for
planning is organized. There is no reason why
marketing cannot be audited in the same way
as accounts, in spite of its more innovative,
subjective nature. A marketing audit is a
systematic appraisal of all the external and
internal factors that have affected a company’s
commercial performance over a defined
period.
Given the growing turbulence of the busi-
ness environment and the shorter product life
cycles that have resulted, no one would deny
the need to stop at least once a year at a
particular point in the planning cycle to try to
form a reasoned view of how all the many
external and internal factors have influenced
performance.
Sometimes, of course, a company will
conduct a marketing audit because it is in
financial trouble. At times like these, manage-
ment often attempts to treat the wrong symp-
toms, most frequently by reorganizing theFigure 5.2 The ten steps of the strategic marketing planning process