The Successful Marketing Plan : A Disciplined and Comprehensive Approach

Rating:
Summary: Marketing for the Masochist
Review: I guess I'm really going against the masses with my 2-star review of this book since the authors claim that it was so successful it warranted a third edition, but I was sorely disappointed with my purchase and plan on returning it. The book opens up with a thorough and dry introduction about why *disciplined* marketing planning is so important. I can't say I was really sold on their main argument--which was basically that marketing can only be done well when it's totally comprehensive and systematic. Those are definitely good traits to adopt in any undertaking, but I just feel that this book is overkill.

The book touts its main benefit as reducing the complexity of coming up with a marketing plan to "just" a 10-step process. It then takes two chapters and about 75 pages just to outline only the first step of this process, called the business review, and describes in painstaking detail everything that the marketer or marketing consultant should do in order to get as thorough an understanding of the business as possible.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all about doing my due diligence and developing a thorough understanding of the company I'm doing a marketing plan for, but creating a marketing plan in the manner that these authors describe would easily take over 300 hours of time.

What's more, I don't get the sense from this book that there is an overarching guiding theory into which all elements of the book can be placed in context. Rather, it seems the approach of the authors is to take every known idea from the canon of marketing and incorporate each idea into some step of the lengthy 10-step process.

In the end, I just feel like this book goes overboard with the requirements it demands of the "disciplined" and "comprehensive" marketer. I can see why they use the word disciplined to describe their approach since in my view it would be truly painful to endure it.

I was very interested to read the reviews of others on this book, and I was disappointed to find that I had the opportunity to be the first reviewer. I'll keep looking around for my dream "how to prepare a marketing plan" book, but in the meantime I've realized that the "disciplined and comprehensive approach" is not for me.