Sales forecasting

Sales forecasting is defined as a projection into the future of expected demand, given as stated set of environmental conditions. Forecasting is the term used to describe procedures for foretelling the future. An alternative term is ‘prediction’ and most writers use the terms interchangeably.

This is distinguished from the sale plan, which here defined as a set of specified managerial action to be undertaken to meet or exceed the sales forecast.

Since a sales forecast revolves around a specific target market, that market should be defined as precisely as possible. The market description forms the forecasting boundary.

Because the goal of sales forecasting is to make the projections within a defined environment, a key measure of performance is accuracy off the forecast and a key method to explain variances in accuracy is how the environment varied from the one defined.

Sales forecasting must take into account the total market environment; the national and industry market, and the firm’s own performance in its traditional markets.

One sales forecast may cover a period of time that is a year or less, while another may extend over several years. Both short-term and long-term forecasts are needed for a well constructed business plan.
Sales forecasting

Marketing management cycle

The marketing management cycle involves marketing planning, marketing execution and marketing evaluation.

Strategic marketing planning is typically seen to be concerned with the definition of marketing objectives and how over, a three to five year period, these objectives might best be achieved.

Marketing execution involves, as the term suggests the execution of the marketing plans; it is concerned with getting the right product or service to the right place at the right time at the right price.

It can be viewed as a process that involves the matching of an organizations; marketing output with market requirements.

Evaluation methods are called controls. These are used to measure the effectiveness of any promotion efforts.  The primary purpose of marketing evaluation is to:
*Track the level and quality of brand awareness
*Pre-test and post-test marketing programme
*Measure behavioral changes in the target market audience
Marketing management cycle

Marketing planning

Marketing is about providing goods and services for which there is a known customer demand, rather than selling wheat the company likes to produce.

It is an exchange relationship: a process providing mutual benefit to both parties in the transaction.

It is a managerial process involving analysis, planning, implementation and control. Excellent marketing planning is a core requirement for marketers.

The purpose of marketing planning and its principle focus are the identification and creating of competitive advantage.

Marketing planning is the planned application of marketing resources to achieve marketing objective.  It is a systematic process involving the assessment of resources and the marketing opportunities and threats.

It will require a so-called approach with plans such as production, finance and personnel linking with a marketing plan.

The marketing planning process enables information, aims and ideas to be developed into a document that can be easily understood, evaluated and implemented.

Marketing represents a holistic, competitive orientation for business. Marketing planning clearly involves the matching of an organization’s resources with environment, opportunities and constraints in its efforts to achieve long –term ‘strategic’ competitive advantage.
Marketing planning

Planning for Survival

Planning for Survival
Organizations will differ in what they regard as ‘long term’ and said it would adopt longer rather than shorter timescale.

It should be obvious that we are looking to achieve rather more than conventional planning sets out to do.

In particular, whether most conventional planning extrapolates from existing trends, we are attempting to detect the major discontinuities which may derail these trends.

The greatest long term threat faced by organizations and by whole industries, comes from unexpected discontinuities which undermines the way that they do business.

In example of this has been the coal industry, especially in the United Kingdom. Barely two decades ago miners were the ‘aristocrats’ of manual labor, working in an industry – one of the fundamentals in any economy which seemed to have a a very prosperous future.

The trends were there for all to see: steadily growing use of electrical power, which had to be produced by large coal-burning power stations, which depended upon deep pits nearby for their supplies.

In fact, the outcome is very different. The reason for this are complex, but a number of unexpected discontinuities contributed to this:

Economics
The introduction of bulk carriers, a development in the technology of sea-borne transport, meant that coal could be delivered cheaply from vast open-cast mines on the other side of the world.

Despite the distances involved, it could be delivered to the power stations at prices considerably below that of the coal expensively hewn from the deep pits nearby.

Society
The emergence of a powerful environmental lobby, opposed to the pollution (especially acid rain) caused by coal burning stations, changed the ground rules.

Much of the foreign coal had a low sulphur concept so that it required less treatment of the emissions, while local coal needed significant investment in ‘scrubber’.

Worse still, the newly available supplies of natural gas did not need any such treatment.

Technology
A new generation of gas powered generators were not just more efficient and less polluting, but required a capital investment which was only a fraction of their coal fired competitors.

Politics
All of this was, at the end of the day, overshadowed, in the United Kingdom at least by political developments. At one extreme, the onset of privatization created regional electricity companies which wanted to control their own supplies – even at a cost – and the lower investment in gas powered stations met this need.

At the other extreme, Conservative government wanted to contain the power of the trade unions; and miners – with leaders who powerfully symbolized all that was seen to be wrong with the previous political balance were naïve enough to allow themselves to be used in the destruction of the coal industry as a major weapon in the governments’ campaign.

Caught on the middle of these discontinuities, the coal industry changed from being a major part of the economy, employing hundreds of thousands of manual workers, to a few privatized pits, with a few thousand workers.
Planning for Survival

Advertising Account Planning

Advertising Account Planning
One of the services offered by many ‘full service advertising agencies’ is to bring a form of research and development to bear on the progress of converting guidelines in the client’s brief into a formal creative strategy.

The prefix ‘account’ is misleading in two ways.

First, it has nothing to do with financial accounts, but is explained by the fact that advertising agencies have always used it to describe one discrete project handed over by a client; ‘the Fairy Liquid account’, for example.

Second, the focus of planning is not the account itself but development of an advertising campaign. It is therefore no surprise that the description is nowadays more usually just ‘planning’.

Account planners are, the intellectual wing of business. Their goal is to understand consumers, audiences, market and society and to use that knowledge as a basis for the development of effective advertising message.

They do not play any part in the craft of converting those messages into the words and images that make-up actual advertisement, but are generally responsible for any comparatively pre-tests of alternative treatments.

In practice, even that modest level of involvement in the creative process can bring them into conflict with key people in the agency’s creative department, who may maintain that making advertisements is an intuitive skill, not amenable to design by committee and only inhibited by research based theorizing.

For that, the most logical job description would in fact be ‘creative planning’, clearly complementing the long-established ‘media planning’ discipline.

Account planning seems to be in prolonged adolescence at the turn of the century, not yet really widespread in smaller or less sophisticated advertising agencies. It originated in London, and remains something of a British specialization.
Advertising Account Planning

What is marketing management?

What is marketing management?
Marketing management can be defined as a process of planning, implementation, and control; that it covers goods, services, and ideas to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals.

Marketing management can be practiced in anyway market. The manager of human resources deals in labor market; the manager of purchasing; the raw materials market; and the manager of finance, the money market. They must set objectives and develop strategies for achieving satisfactory results in the markets. Traditionally, however, these executives have no been called marketers, or have they trained in marketing. At best, they are part time marketers. Instead, marketing management is historically identified with tasks and personnel dealing with the customer market.

The popular image of marketing manager is someone whose task is primarily to stimulate demand for the company’s product. However, this is too limited a view of the diversity of marketing tasks they perform.

Marketing managers manage demand by carrying out marketing research, planning, implementation and control. Within marketing planning, marketers must make decisions on target markets, market positioning, product development, pricing, distribution, channels, physical distribution, communications and promotion.
What is marketing management?