Marketing Planning: Observations on Current Practices and Recent Studies

This article is about marketing planning. It is a subject which is ot treated extensively in the literature and is not well understood by many academics and practitioners, according to a well‐known researcher in the field. Major marketing planning problems identified by others are introduced and compared with the findings of a field study among 79 practitioners in the US and 19 other countries. Among the various similarities and differences in planning which were identified, it was concluded that distinctions must be made among types of businesses and between annual (operational) planning and longer‐range strategic planning. This includes the people involved, the use of the term strategy in its various forms, and most importantly, the difference in content between product and corporate plans, short and long range.