What do you mean by long term marketing planning? State its essential characteristics and process.
The long-term planning for marketing may be defined as a systematic and formalised process for purposefully directing and controlling future’ marketing operations of an organisation towards desired marketing objectives for periods extending beyond one year.
The long-term planning for marketing covers a time period which is long enough to provide the marketing management with an opportunity to anticipate future problems, and thus to have a greater freedom of action to resolve them in an orderly manner.
The marketing management can establish its long-term objectives and then decide its strategy for achieving its objectives. This stage of long-term marketing planning has become to be known as the strategic marketing planning.
According to Peter F. Drucker, “long-range planning is not masterminding the future. (It) does not deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions. (It) is not an attempt to eliminate risk. Rather it seeks to raise the capacity to take risks”. These have great relevance to a long-term planning for marketing also.
The major characteristics of LTMP are:
(1) LTMP thinks ahead beyond the horizon of current events, current policies, and strategies.
(2) It appraises the present and potential strengths and weaknesses of an organisation so that not only the future opportunities are matched with the capabilities of the organisation but in the long run the capabilities of the firm are shaped to future business opportunities.
(3) It provides a structure or a set of plans for the entire business in action and suggests an integrated framework within which each of the functional plans (e.g. production, personnel, finance) are interlinked.
(4) It induces the management to identify and evaluate options for investment and growth, and assists to accelerate the rate of growth by identifying new opportunities.
LTMP Process:
The process of LTMP consists of the following elements and steps:
- Analysis of the factors like:
- International environment
- National economy
- Present, and future markets for each one of the products of the company.
- Assessment of factoral impacts on the industry’s behavioural patterns.
- Estimation, decision, and development of:
- Functional goals to achieve market share
- Resources to meet functional goals
- Programmes relating to manpower, capital, production, distribution, etc. for resources optimisation.
- Review and revaluation of plans in tune with changing business environment.
For LTMP process, Philip Kotler suggests consideration of the following situations:
