Marketing plans and the information they contain are somewhat subjective - you'll essentially get different answers from different people.

What follows is a discussion of the elements proposed within the coursework at WVU.

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Elements of the Marketing Plan

While marketing plans vary from company to company, most plans cover these seven basic areas:

1. Situation Analysis
2. Marketing Objectives
3. Marketing Strategy
4. Target Market
5. Competitive Strategies
6. Implementation (Action Programs)
7. Evaluation

Situation Analysis
The situation analysis is the section of the marketing plan that identifies and evaluates all of the environmental factors affecting the marketing program. The situation analysis is generally comprised of five sections: market situation, product situation, competitive situation, distribution situation and macroenvironment situation.

* Market Situation. The market situation provides descriptive information about the target market(s), as well as an outline of changes and/or anticipated changes (if any) in the target market.
* Product Situation. The product situation offers information on the sales, pricing, market share, and profit margins.
* Competitive Situation. The competitive situation provides descriptive information concerning all major competitors and potential competitors.
* Distribution Situation. The distribution situation describes each channel of distribution to be used along with such factors as market coverage (e.g. inclusive, selective or exclusive), inventory management, order processing, transportation and logistics.
* Macroenvironment Situation. The macroenvironment section of the situation analysis provides information about broad macroenviromental trends (i.e., demographic, economic, technological, political, legal, sociocultural) that might affect the company and its products or services.

Marketers often outline these variables in the form of a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). You can find out more about the SWOT analysis and how it relates to creative strategy in the Emmerling article for this week.

Marketing Objectives
Determining a company's specific marketing objectives is typically done in two steps. First, the company outlines its financial objectives regarding such areas as profitability, return on investment (ROI), and cash flow. The second step of the process explains how the company will achieve these goals. A marketing objective for Coca-Cola, for example, might read something like this: "Coca-Cola Classic would like to see a five percent growth in sales in the next year."

Marketing Strategy
Marketing strategies are the steps a company plans to take to achieve its marketing goals. There are several strategies Coca-Cola might use in meeting the above marketing objective including: reducing price, offering coupons, increasing mass media advertising, or increasing distribution outlets. It's important to remember that every marketing objective must have at least one marketing strategy to go with it and, often, there will be more than one.

Target Market
A target market is the group of people most likely to purchase or use a company's products or services. For those of us in communications, determining the target market is often the most important step; after all, if we don't know who the target market is, we can't effectively reach them with any kind of advertisement or promotion.

The target market is carefully determined by considering both demographic (e.g., age, gender, race, income) and psychographic (e.g., lifestyle, interests, attitudes) variables. Geographic segmentation (e.g., local, regional, national, north, south) can also be a factor; it certainly will be important for Southwest Airlines. Target markets can also be segmented by usage factors (e.g., new category users, other-brand loyal, and other-brand switchers). One of the primary values of choosing a target market is that it reduces the waste associated with trying to reach an entire market; the other value is that specific information on a market can be used to tailor the content of a company's communications to its target consumers.

Here are some questions you might consider when trying to determine your target market(s) for Southwest*:

* Is the potential market segment the right size and does it have the necessary growth characteristics?
* Does the segment have sufficient long-term profitability? Considerations include: the threat that the segment has too many competitors, the threat of a new competitor, the threat of substitute products, the threat that the power of buyers becomes oppressive, or the threat that the power of suppliers becomes oppressive.
* Does the segment correspond with the company’s objectives and resources? If selecting more than one segment as target markets, are these segments complementary in respect to cost, performance, and technology?

*Source: Kotler, P. (1994). Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation, and Control, 8th ed., Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 281–283.

Incidentally, in terms of target market, America truly is one big Melting Pot, and it's becoming more so all the time. As Jewler and Drewniany point out in Chapter 2 of Creative Strategy in Advertising, the purchasing power of groups like African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans is growing. The buying power of older Americans (age 50+), women, handicapped individuals, and gay couples also continues to rise. Your text offers a fabulous look at these different target groups and information on how to reach them, as well as some sample advertisements. This week's Forehand and Deshpande article from the Journal of Marketing Research offers further information on the ethnic segment and how they interpret and respond to brand messages.

Competitive Strategies
This is the section of the marketing plan where a company must differentiate its product/service from that of the competition. This task can be accomplished through either product differentiation, product positioning, or branding. Lets look at each of these strategies in more detail:

* Product Differentiation. Product differentiation is the process of making a product different in the mind of the consumer, even when differences across the product category are minimal or non-existent. Product differences can be tangible (e.g. size, color, quality, fragrance) or intangible (upscale, trendy, professional). To illustrate this point, see the Cardona article from this week for the inside scoop on the recent differentiation efforts of Banana Republic.
* Product Positioning. The position is the image a product projects relative to images presented by both competitive products and other products marketed by the same company. Positioning is also about how marketers want consumers to view their product as compared to the competition. The product positioning process involves identifying the most important beliefs, attitudes, and product usage habits of the customer, assessing how the marketer’s product is perceived relative to these factors, then placing the product in its most advantageous light.
* Branding Strategies. Branding strategies attempt to establish a strong position through the power of the brand. Powerful brands (think McDonald's, FedEx, or Walt Disney) create long-lasting images in the minds of consumers by identifying the product, anchoring its position, and establishing an image or personality for the product that makes it distinctive, liked, and valued. Brands are extremely important because once they're established in consumers' minds, the brand serves as cognitive shortcut which might connote positive qualities such as convenience, solid values, or great customer service. In fact, you should strongly consider using a branding strategy for Southwest.

Implementation Tactics
The implementation section of the marketing plan has traditionally outlined elements such as product, price, distribution, and promotion -- commonly known as the 4 P's. If you’ve taken a basic marketing course, you’re probably already familiar with the "4 P’s" of the marketing mix. But IMC practitioners are bucking tradition and moving away from the traditional 4 P’s to a more customer-focused way of thinking known as the 4 C’s -- customer, cost, convenience and communication.

The first two elements, customer and cost, are pretty self-explanatory. Let’s look at the second two a little closer.

* Convenience. In IMC, convenience refers to how easy it is for customers to obtain a product/service, rather than how easy it is for the company to distribute is.
* Communication. In IMC, communication means listening to the customer and learning what they want and need rather than simply telling them about a product and attempting to sell it to them.

Evaluation
Evaluation involves looking at the effectiveness of your marketing plan before, during, and after its implementation. Evaluation will be important to organizations and the marketers who serve them over the next several years because as management demands more accountability, marketing expenditures will come under increasing scrutiny. What aspects of the marketing plan can we test? Can we translate the results to the real world? How many variables can we control? All of these questions and more will continue to be debated in the years ahead.

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What is interesting is that even small businesses can utlize this template to improve how they market, allowing them more bang for the buck and greater returns.