Marketing Planning Framework
The Marketing Needs Assessment, carried out in 2005, identified the need for a marketing planning framework which structures how organisations in the sector can apply marketing theory to their practice.
The marketing planning framework has the following stages:
- Goal setting
- Review
- Strategy setting
- Implementation
- Evaluation
1. Goal setting
This step entails an outline of ‘big picture’ issues. Its about clarifying and agreeing a précis of the strategic context of a museum, library or archive. It may already be summarised in an organisation’s mission, vision and values statement.
2. Review
The aim of this stage is to establish a context for managing change and to begin to highlight service and knowledge gaps which the marketing planning process can address. Understanding consumers is key to this stage.
3. Strategy setting
This step entails moving on from the analytical steps of Goal setting and Review by hitting upon strategies which articulate how a set of marketing objectives are going to be achieved. Marketing objectives are about services and markets and state what is to be done by when. It makes clear which groups of people or market segments are to be targeted.
4. Implementation
This step is about delivering marketing objectives through changing key aspects of the overall offer. These aspects are usually expressed under categories of:
- Product - range of product and services
- Place & Physical attributes - service points and access
- Price - costs to customers
- People – workforce development
- Processes - customer facing processes
- Promotion – service promotions and marketing communications
5. Evaluation
This step is about making marketing planning a systematic process which is repeated in a planned cycle in order to develop organisational learning. This section of the marketing plan identifies the processes of data capture necessary to inform that learning and to enable qualitative and quantitative evaluation of activity.
