Market Planning Guide, 6E

Rating:
Summary: Publicize, and market any business, product, or service
Review: Now in its sixth edition, The Market Planning Guide by entrepreneur David H. Bangs, Jr. (founder of the Upstart Publishing Company) is a straightforward, "user friendly", and highly recommended guide to creating a plan to promote, publicize, and market any business, product, or service. From price setting guidelines, to analyzing the competition, to responding quickly to inevitable market changes, The Market Planning Guide is an excellent basic "how to" resource, filled from cover to cover with a wealth of recommendations, charts, tips, tricks, techniques and much more.

Rating:
Summary: Publicize, and market any business, product, or service
Review: Now in its sixth edition, The Market Planning Guide by entrepreneur David H. Bangs, Jr. (founder of the Upstart Publishing Company) is a straightforward, "user friendly", and highly recommended guide to creating a plan to promote, publicize, and market any business, product, or service. From price setting guidelines, to analyzing the competition, to responding quickly to inevitable market changes, The Market Planning Guide is an excellent basic "how to" resource, filled from cover to cover with a wealth of recommendations, charts, tips, tricks, techniques and much more.

Rating:
Summary: Workbook style marketing planning guide. Excellent.
Review: This is a large cover book (8.5 by 11) of 240 pages filled with exercises in workbook style. Having purchased several really good marketing books, I had learned the theory and practice but in coming up with my own marketing plan I lacked a workbook. This book filled the void.

The book has 12 chapters and four sections in the Appendix. The best part about the book is that in each chapter, the authors clearly explain the high-level theory and provide the exercises to help you come up with the answers right for your situation. These exercise take the form of sections in each chapter headed by a question. Overall, there are 30 sections (or questions) in the book. This is a good approach as any workbook needs questions to stimulate your thinking and be an effective workbook.

The topics are well chosen - products and services, customers and prospects, competitive analysis, price setting, advertising and promotion, etc. One of my personal favorite chapters was on price setting which isn't dealt with in great detail in a lot of books. I am currently following this simple approach in setting the prices for the various services offered in my small business.

Why only 4 stars? There isn't enough coverage of the website component of a business. But for the very low price of this book, you can't go wrong in buying this excellent marketing workbook. Enjoy!