Book Review: The Marketing Plan in Colour by Malcolm McDonald and Peter Morris
Butterworth-Heinemann ISBN 0-7506-4759-0. £15.99

This updated edition is highly unusual in that it adopts a comic strip format to present Professor McDonald's recommendations on effective and efficient marketing planning. He developed his classic views at the Cranfield School of Management and this format, first published in 1987, is a highly accessible variant.

The Book explains how to integrate the marketing process with the other key strands of business planning: sales; product development; finance; personnel; and distribution. He shows how to reconcile divergent objectives in each of these areas by resolving a series of audits and SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) analyses into shared assumptions about the business environment and a set of objectives and strategies.

He goes on to consider plans for marketing communications, pricing, distribution and then links these plans to sales and market information and forecasting as a total system.

Management teams and sales representatives don't get the time to read lots of books. However, if you are only going to read one book on marketing, then this is the one. You may know all that is in it, after all marketing is just common sense, but I bet you don't do it all.

The strongest part of the book is the way that it shows how to link market segmentation analysis through sales coverage planning to the advertising and sales promotion plans. My criticisms concern coverage of the trend to provide hybrid service and product solutions and the role of value added resellers.

I think that managers in smaller businesses selling information technology to industry would find this book particularly useful. It could provide excellent preparation to ensure that the management team turn the efforts of an "away day" into revenue and profit.

.Mike Evans

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