Everyone who has a part to play in the project, including outside organizations, participates, страница 9

1. Summarize advantages, costs, and profits, and clearly state the differential advantage that your plan for this product or service offers over the competition and why the plan will succeed. X. Appendices

1. Include all supporting information that you consider relevant.

Figure 3-2  (Continued)

them. In fact, few marketing plans will be read word for word in their entirety by top executives in your company. Rather, certain sections will be read in detail and other sections only scanned. However, almost every executive will read the executive summary.

It is therefore important that in this summary you capture the essence of your plan in a few short, terse paragraphs so that you can describe the thrust of what the plan purports to do, the objectives and goals that are the intent of the plan, and a bird's-eye view of the strategy that will be used to accomplish these objectives and goals. This summary shouldn't exceed two or three pages at the maximum.

After a few minutes' reading of your executive summary, the reader should understand what it is you want to do, how much it will cost, and what the likely chances of success are. Most important, he or she will understand the competitive differential advantage inherent in your marketing plan that will cause it to succeed.

Table of Contents. You may wonder about the discussion of something so mundane and simplistic as a table of contents in a discussion as important and sometimes as complicated as that of marketing planning. Yet, the table of contents is extremely important as a part of the marketing plan. As noted previously, most top-level executives will not read the entire plan in detail except for the executive summary and certain areas that may be of particular interest to them.

For example, in top management, the vice-president of finance will be very interested in the financial part of your marketing plan and what different elements of the plan will cost, to implement and when these monies will be needed. A vice-president of engineering or of research and development will probably be more interested in the technical as pects and performance characteristics of the products that are required. These executives may even skip items that you as a marketing manager think are crucial, such as sales, sales promotion, and advertising. Therefore, it is not sufficient that every subject area critical to the project be covered in your plan.

In addition, because of other readers who may be interested in your plan or may be required to take some actions as a part of it, you must make it as easy as possible to find any topic of interest quickly. The table of contents is used for this purpose. If you do not use a table of contents, other executives and individuals involved in the implementation of your marketing plan will probably make some attempt at locating the information they want. But, if they cannot find it, they may assume that it is mil there. This is not only a question of wasted time hut of a negative impact on those whose support in adoption or implementation may be crucial to success. Therefore, inclusion of a table of contents is mandatory.

Situational Analysis and Target Market. The situational analysis is a detailed description of the environment or the company and the product, product line, or service at the time the plan will be initiated and implemented. It should include a detailed discussion of the environs of the marketplace, including your company, your competition, neutral environs, and situational environs; and it must have market characteristics, including the segments of the overall market in which you're interested, growth trends, specific customer identification, buyer attitudes and habits, geographical location of the market segments, industry pricing, size of the various market segments in dollars and units, technological trends, distribution factors and issues, and other important characteristics.