Theoretical or Practical Marketing?

Hello friends!

Yesterday I was talking with a coworker, who is studying Industrial Engineering, and he is taking a Marketing course. The interesting thing is that he asked me if I could help him to answer a question that his teacher had done:

For an entrepreneur or little business, is necessary to make a complete Marketing plan/strategy?

My immediate response was ... DEPENDS. To which my friend asked me the obvious question ... Depends on what? And my next response was: It depends if you want a theoretical answer (or book answer) or a practical one.

The theoretical answer is: Yes, anyway you should make a complete Marketing plan/strategy. Otherwise how could you get the most out of every dollar you invest in marketing. You should follow roughly the following:

1 .- What is the product / service will be offered.

2 .- What is the target market of the product / service.

3 .- What is the Marketing Mix "available" to the target market about my product.

4 .- Define the strategy according to the amount you will invest.

In my perception, the practical answer would be: Not necessarily, before you invest a single minute of your time in planning your Marketing plan/strategy you have to keep in mind how much you'll invest. And depending on that, you should spend the necessary time developing the plan, and obviously how perfect it is going to be (again depends on how much do you want to spend). So the practical procedure should be:

1 .- How are you going to invest.

2 .- What is the product / service will be offered.

3 .- What is the target market of the product / service.

4 .- What is the Marketing Mix available for my budget, my product and my target market.

But in addition I would add one point, often not mentioned in the books of Marketing, which is that any plan / strategy it is just a guide. Many times our product / service with which we believe is our target market has very weak relationship, and strangely other uses and markets appear that we had not thought of. And all the time invested in our plan we can not be recovered again.