THENEWRATPACK - Strategy
THENEWRATPACK - Strategy
THENEWRATPACK - Strategy
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One relaxing day this spring I was approached<br />
by strategy to assess an off-the-shelf marketing<br />
planning tool. They wanted to get the<br />
perspective of someone who has lived through<br />
many marketing planning cycles and currently<br />
offers strategic business and marketing<br />
consulting support to assess the tool.<br />
Objective: Review pre-packaged marketing<br />
planning software and comment on its utility<br />
and ease of use.<br />
The Marketing Plan Pro package from Palo<br />
Alto Software claims to be the number-oneselling<br />
marketing-planning software for seven<br />
years running. It lists a quote from Accounting<br />
Today that it is “…the simplest way to create<br />
a marketing plan that will improve the<br />
profi tability, awareness and long-term stability<br />
of your business.”<br />
Products like these could represent a real<br />
threat to someone who makes their living<br />
providing brand and marketing planning<br />
guestreview<br />
<strong>Strategy</strong> gets sent a lot of books, software and assorted schemes and step programs for<br />
making marketing easy. We often wonder what works. So we asked a marketer. Here's the<br />
verdict on a planning software entry, and just how much it actually could make life easier . . .<br />
MARKETING PLAN PRO<br />
PROVIDES GOOD START<br />
By Mike Welling<br />
they describe<br />
a brand more<br />
in terms of... a<br />
secondary result<br />
of successful<br />
marketing versus<br />
a core asset of<br />
the business<br />
counsel! Undaunted, I spent some time with<br />
the product and here is a summary.<br />
Overall, it’s easy to use and provides a<br />
pretty good summary of how to not only<br />
build a marketing or business plan, but also<br />
what you need to do to execute against that<br />
plan. This type of tool can be quite useful for<br />
companies with less sophisticated business<br />
planning processes or which need to allocate<br />
more focused time to planning, and will be<br />
especially useful for anyone embarking on a<br />
new business venture and hasn’t had to pull<br />
together business plans before.<br />
It comes with software, a small manual<br />
and two books: The 22 Immutable Laws of<br />
Branding by Al and Laura Ries, and On Target:<br />
The Book on Marketing Plans by Tim Berry and<br />
Doug Wilson. Both are great (not just because<br />
they come in a large font for those aging<br />
boomers out there) but because they contain<br />
useful information. The 22 Immutable Laws
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