Basic Marketing: A Global Managerial Approach

Perreault−McCarthy: Basic
Marketing: A
Global−Managerial
Approach, 14/e

21. Developing Innovative
    Marketing Plans

Text © The McGraw−Hill

Companies, 2002

Developing Innovative Marketing Plans 631

Well-known U.S.-based multinational firms include Coca-Cola, Eastman Kodak,

Goodyear, Ford, and IBM. They regularly earn over a third of their total sales or

profits abroad. And well-known foreign-based multinationals—such as Nestlé, Shell

(Royal Dutch Shell), Unilever, Sony, and Honda—have well-accepted brands all

around the world.

These multinational operations no longer just export or import. They hire local

workers and build local plants. They have relationships with local businesses and

politicians. These powerful organizations learn to plan marketing strategies that deal

with nationalistic feelings and typical border barriers—treating them simply as part

of the marketing environment. We don’t yet have one world politically—but busi-

ness is moving in that direction. We may have to develop new kinds of corporations

and laws to govern multinational operations. In the future, it will make less and less

sense for business and politics to be limited by national boundaries.

Usually marketing managers must plan the firm’s overall marketing program so

it’s flexible enough to be adapted for differences in various countries. When the dif-

ferences are significant, top management should delegate a great deal of

responsibility for strategy planning to local managers (or even middlemen). In many

cases, it’s not possible to develop a detailed plan without a local feel. In extreme

cases, local managers may not even be able to fully explain some parts of their plans

because they’re based on subtle cultural differences. Then plans must be judged only

by their results. The organizational setup should give these managers a great deal of

freedom in their planning but ensure tight control against the plans they develop.

Top management can simply insist that managers stick to their budgets and meet

the plans that they themselves create. When a firm reaches this stage, it is being

managed like a well-organized domestic corporation—which insists that its man-

agers (of divisions and territories) meet their own plans so that the whole company’s

program works as intended.^14

Planning for

international markets

Conclusion

In this chapter, we stressed the importance of develop-

ing whole marketing mixes—not just developing policies

for the individual four Ps and hoping they will fit together

into some logical whole. The marketing manager is re-

sponsible for developing a workable blend—integrating

all of a firm’s efforts into a coordinated whole that makes

effective use of the firm’s resources and guides it toward its

objectives.

As a starting place for developing new marketing

mixes, a marketing manager can use the product classes

that have served as a thread through this text. Even if

the manager can’t fully describe the needs and attitudes

of target markets, it is usually possible to select the

appropriate product class for a particular product. This,

in turn, will help set Place and Promotion policies. It

may also clarify what type of marketing mix is typical for

the product. However, just doing what is typical may not

give a firm any competitive advantage. Creative strate-

gies are often the ones that identify new and better ways

of uniquely giving target customers what they want or

need. Similarly, seeing where a firm’s offering fits in the

product life cycle helps to clarify how current marketing

mixes are likely to change in the future.

Developing and evaluating marketing strategies and

plans usually requires that the manager use some ap-

proach to forecasting. We talked about two basic

approaches to forecasting market potential and sales: (1)

extending past behavior and (2) predicting future be-

havior. The most common approach is to extend past

behavior into the future. This gives reasonably good

results if market conditions are fairly stable. Methods

here include extension of past sales data and the factor

method. We saw that projecting the past into the future

is risky when big market changes are likely. To make up

for this possible weakness, marketers predict future

behavior using their own experience and judgment.

They also bring in the judgment of others—using the

jury of executive opinion method and salespeople’s