Basic Marketing: A Global Managerial Approach

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

19. Implementing and
    Controlling Marketing
    Plans: Evolution and
    Revolution

Text © The McGraw−Hill

Companies, 2002

Implementing and Controlling Marketing Plans: Evolution and Revolution 547

for making implementation and control more effective. We’ll start with a discussion

of how dramatic improvements in information technology and e-commerce are

resulting in changes in implementation and control—and in the whole strategy

planning process. For many firms, these changes are critically important. They offer

revolutionary new ways to meet customer needs. Next we’ll highlight some of the

new approaches, including total quality management, that are improving marketing

implementation. Then we’ll explain how marketing managers use control-related

tools, such as sales and performance analysis, to improve the quality of planning

and implementation decisions. We’ll conclude with a discussion of what a market-

ing audit is, and why it is sometimes necessary.

This state-of-the-art information

center has replaced over 25

individual processing centers

worldwide and allows Colgate

managers to monitor activities

across the entire supply chain

worldwide, all of which brings

products to consumers faster

and more efficiently than ever

before.

Speed Up Information for Better Implementation and Control

Feedback improves

the marketing

management process

Not long ago, marketing managers planned their strategies and put them into

action—but then it usually took a long time before they got feedback to know

if the strategy and implementation were really working as intended. For exam-

ple, a marketing manager might not have much feedback on what was happening

with sales, expenses, and profits until financial summaries were available—and

that sometimes took months or even longer. Further, summary data wasn’t very

useful in pinpointing which specific aspects of the plan were working and which

weren’t. In that environment, the feedback was so general and took so long that

there often wasn’t anything the manager could do about a problem except start

over.

That situation has now changed dramatically in many types of business. In Chap-

ter 8, we discussed how firms are using intranets, databases, and marketing

information systems to track sales and cost details day by day and week by week.

Throughout the book you’ve seen examples of how marketers get more information

faster and use it quickly to improve a strategy or its implementation. For example,

scanner data from a consumer panel can provide a marketing manager with almost

immediate feedback on whether or not a new consumer product is selling at the

expected level in each specific store and whether or not it is actually selling to the

intended target market rather than some other group. Similarly, e-commerce order

systems can feed into real-time sales reports for each product.