Reading: Frameworks for for Creating Marketing Plans

Frameworks for Marketing Plans

There are many frameworks used to create a marketing plan. A framework does what its name implies: it provides a structured set of guidelines around which to build something, in this case, a marketing plan. The idea of a framework is that, if you follow the guides carefully, you will have a complete and actionable plan.

Some of the frameworks you study can be applied in many different situations – they are not just for marketing planning. There are also a lot of them. Hubspot provides a summary of some of the most common, several of which we will introduce below.

For our purposes, we will introduce several fairly simple frameworks that you can apply throughout your studies.

A Framework for Studying Marketing 101

Here we use a number of overlapping frameworks that split the job of marketing planning into three parts:

1. Macroenvironment planning
2. Customer market planning
3. Marketing Mix planning

Within each one, we use other sub-frameworks to help you organise the content that you need to analyse and understand. The overall structure of the planning content looks like this:

5Cs Macro Analysis Framework

The analysis of the microenvironment follows a 5Cs framework consisting of separate sub-sections in order from broadest to narrowest:

1. Context
2. Company
3. Competition
4. Collaborators
5. Customers

In turn, the customer section of the 5Cs framework leads to the second part of the planning process, the STP analysis:

STP Analysis

The STP analysis provides a detailed picture of who the company’s customers are (and, as a result, who its customers are not, and so the types of customers who the company does not need to invest marketing resources into). The STP analysis also has three sections in order from broadest to narrowest:

1. Segmentation
2. Targeting
3. Positioning

In turn, the positioning section of the STP framework leads to the third part of the planning process, the 4Ps analysis:

4Ps: Positioning

The 4Ps analysis consists of further sub-sections. If we were marketing services, we’d focus on 7Ps, adding in People, Processes and Physical Evidence, but in this case, we focus specifically on product marketing (marketing of tangible products), which covers:

1. Product
2. Place
3. Price
4. Promotion

We will return to this framework again and again throughout the course. It is also one that can be used for report writing and planning in many different situations.