Book Club: Marketing Planning – 7th edition by Professors Malcolm MacDonald & Hugh Wilson
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Karen Davies, Director at Triniti Marketing, reads Marketing Planning and finds it generally helpful but lacking in certain areas.
This is the 7th edition of Malcolm MacDonald’s Marketing Plans, this time co-authored with Professor Hugh Wilson, a multi channel strategy and CRM specialist.
The first thing to say is that, for a text book of 550 odd pages, it is pretty user friendly. The authors recognise that few people, with the exception perhaps of marketing students, are likely to read this book cover to cover, so they make it easy to dip in and out. Each chapter opens with a succinct bulleted summary of what it will cover, so you can see quickly if it has what you need.
The theory is brought to life with case studies, which are mainly good, although I would have liked to see even more of them. The chapters close with a series of practical application questions to bring it back to the reader’s own business and exercises to help build the individual’s skills.
My main criticism of what is, in the main, a well written and useful guide to Marketing Planning lies in some important content gaps. I was disappointed with the space given to one of the biggest challenges facing today’s marketer – the effective use of digital media, and especially social media.
So many brands are spending fortunes on unfocused digital media presence, because they are afraid of getting left behind, but with little idea of how to make it an effective and integrated part of their marketing plan. Whilst this topic is covered briefly as part of integrated communication, there was an apparent reluctance to commit to concrete guidelines, with the get out that ‘practice is developing fast in this area’.
There were no specific application questions or exercises at the end of the chapter, a real missed opportunity. There is also no mention of the role of cause marketing or marketing’s broader role in the CSR agenda when developing marketing plans, which is an increasing challenge with many of our clients.
In summary, this book does the fundamentals of marketing planning well, but is not as informative as I would have expected about some of the hot topics of marketing planning today.
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Posted: February 22nd, 2012 | Author: Leah.Latimer | Filed under: book club | Tags: book club, Hugh Wilson, Karen Davies, Marketing Blog, marketing planning, Marketing Society blog, professor Malcolm MacDonald, Triniti Marketing | Leave a Comment »
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