As a first time "marketer" I can easily admit that in writing and synthesizing our marketing plan for Allround we clearly had some goals that were too high to reach as well as strategy implementations that were simply too strict to follow to a "T" without risking harm to the brand. For example, a situation analysis had revealed that our sales force allocation was inefficient and likely due to increasing sales force by too great of a magnitude each period. Therefore in our marketing strategy plan we said that we would not increase sales force by more than 5 employees per period. We also said that any channel growth would receive an additional employee for every 5% growth that channel experienced. We quickly saw that although these were good strategies to make sales force efficient in theory, they were conflicting and unrealistic. For some periods, every channel grew more than 5%... some even 15%. This resulted in needing to add 9 sales force personnel (which deviated from what we had planned to do in our strategy).
However, no plan is ever implemented perfectly and our group can certainly attest to that. We had to weigh the benefits vs. risks in deviating from the plan. In keeping with the example mentioned above: a benefit of deviating from the plan was that we would be giving growing channels more sales force support despite the rule of only adding 5 vs. risking not supporting those growing channels because we were limited to only 5 per period.
The moral of the story: the marketing plan was the guideline to follow, but exceptions were made and rules were tweaked a bit in order to stay competitive with the constant changes in the market.
Overall, I would say that our team is satisfied with the results of our marketing plan implementation. During the periods before writing the marketing plan, we were not succeeding by any means... our sales were dropping, we were losing market share, our net income was plummeting along with our stock price... it was just overall not pretty. However, by identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, we were able to make decisions based upon where we stood and where we wanted to go (up!). One of the ways we were able to do so was by introducing a new product to an attractive market and using our company's competitive advantage.
We had one period between periods 3 and 7 that we did not do as well (period 5 I think?). However, we noticed that there was just a negative growth in all sales across all channels in the market, so we're hoping that it wasn't just poor decision making! Either way, we took as much information from the research reports, social media comments, market updates, and special situations that we could in order to prepare ourselves to make the best decision IN CONTEXT. I emphasize this because what may be the best decision one period. could turn out to be a bad decision in another period... everything changes... including markets.
Looking forward a bit onto the revision of the strategy memo, there will definitely be some changes made. Mostly, I think we will keep our overall strategy the same but change some of the minor details we had made at the end of period 2. There will likely be much looser requirements/budget limits to account for situational changes each period. In this way, we will not feel like we "have to stick to the plan" rather than taking a great opportunity available to us.
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