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Kelly Odell

- A blog for leaders
15 Apr 2006

The World’s Shortest Marketing Plan

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Every now and then the links seem to fade away.  Since there still seems to be a great deal of interest for my World’s Shortest Marketing Plan Template I have updated the links again and am reposting.

There seems to be a never ending supply of new marketing plan templates. A google search gave 215,000,000 hits on “marketing plan”. The problem most marketing plan templates is that they are just to long. Marketing plan templates often look like a table of contents which you then fill up with substance about your own company and business environment. I have worked with templates that were in themselves over 30 pages long and before you actually start filling them with content. If you followed such a template and answered all the questions you would have a marketing plan of several hundred pages. I was recently visited by a large consulting company who suggested that we should use their template which was a mere 70 pages. Needless to say, I decided not to use their template. Don’t get me wrong, the content of most of these “long” templates is very good and if used as a shopping list over what might be done and not a list of what should be done they can be very useful.

The marketing plan is a communication tool used to give direction to the company. It is not a checklist actions or a demonstration of the marketers analytical prowess. You might think of the marketing plan as a menu describing the food that will be served at a fancy party. This description tells you what will be served and in what order. It does not give you a recipe for every dish, a description of all the various dishes that were considered but not chosen or a deep analysis of why the items on the menu where selected. Naturally someone has to create the menu and a great deal of analysis might be behind every selection but this does not need to be reflected in the menu.

Similarly, strong marketing plans are the result lots of analysis. It may well be that you want to keep all of this analysis together in one place for future reference but the marketing plan is not the right place. The marketing plan should describe target/goals and how they will be achieved during a given planning horizon (typically 1 year) in order to reach the company’s vision. Although marketers can be deeply involved in creating the vision it is typically the CEO’s responsibility. The marketer comes in to describe what underlying customer needs will be addressed with which products or services and to which customers , how will they be packaged, communicated, priced, bundled and distributed.

Some time ago I was asked to speak to a group of MBA students at the Stockholm school of economics about marketing plans. I realized that I was not at all satisfied with the templates we used or any template I had ever used for that matter for the simple reason that they were too long to be used for effective communication.

Below is a template that I created for that presentation and it has been adapted in used in several companies since then with good success. Try to answer each square in the template with no more that one page including diagrams and pictures. This will result in a marketing plan of no more than 24 pages!

Good luck!

Click here to view or download the template.

If you are interested in reading more of my thoughts on marketing follow this link:
THE MARKETING PLAN: THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY

 

About Post Author

Kelly is an outstanding speaker, author and management educator with a disarming honesty and contagious humor that goes straight to the hearts and minds of his readers and audiences. A true storyteller, Kelly draws on his own long experience in global organizations to exemplify key concepts in the areas of leadership, employee engagement, change and motivation. Kelly delivers pragmatic, executable insights that lead to real improvement in individual and organizational performance.

16 Responses

  1. MarketingDiva

    Great post!

    Alot of marketing plan templates, like business plan templates are designed to produce glorious fluff and endless market analysis. They fail to answer the question “What do we do with this knowledge?”

    marketing-diva.blogspot.com

  3. Simon Wakeman

    Kelly – great stuff.

    I’ve got a lot of time for people who can simplify marketing stuff down.

    All too often people hide behind long, wordy marketing plans/strategies – often trying to hide a lack of original thinking or insight.

    A succing format like this means that clever and innovative thinking can come to the fore, and not be hidden by words, jargon and fluff

    thanks,
    Simon

    Marketing, PR and internet consultant

    http://www.simonwakeman.com/journal

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  6. DNeuman

    I’m actually working on a marketing plan right now. I’m on the 24th page and about halfway done. I expected about 20-30 pages going into, but now I’m realizing that it will be well over 50 pages. I guess you don’t realize how much you can type once you get going (and plus the additions of tables and graphs).

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