Our team of jazz music professional are working night and day to bring to you the best in jazz music covering all of the many types of music from yesterday and today. According to McDonald (2002) marketing planning is a process, which is the planned application of marketing resources to achieve marketing objectives. Marketing planning is a logical sequence of stages that organizations adhere to in order to achieve their objectives. Strategic marketing planning is an important activity as it helps organizations to combat increasing business turbulence and adapt to the increasingly complex and competitive environment. Successful marketing plans are positioned within the context of corporate strategic planning. Strategic decisions are generally concerned with the overall long-term direction of the organization, building long-term strategies that will benefit the organization, matching the company’s activities to the available resources and capitalizing on opportunities and minimizing threats. The process of strategic marketing planning can be undertaken in an informal manner, (usually in smaller organizations), or under more structured and complex regimes for larger organizations.
However, there is no set way of undertaking marketing planning and academics have yet to decide on what constitutes the right approach. The idea set out by McDonald appears to be one of the most influential and states that strategic marketing planning is a logical process of setting objectives, formulation of strategies and tactics for achievement, together with the associated financial consequences. Both above views of strategic marketing planning appear to be simplistic in nature due to their logical sequence of stages, but according to McDonald (2002) the process is one of the most difficult marketing tasks to undertake. The principal reason for this is that strategic marketing planning brings together all the elements of marketing into one detailed coherent plan and for this to be successful there is a need for a structured approach and the recognition of potential internal/external obstacles that may impinge on the process of planning and implementation. Care must be exercised, however, that this structure does not become too inflexible. Piercy and Morgan’s (1994) model of strategic marketing planning takes these factors into consideration. One aim of Piercy and Morgan’s model is to identify the impact of both individual manager’s behavior and the broader organizational context on the effective operation of the planning process.
