It must be the sea­son for mar­ket­ing plan­ning. Recently I’ve got­ten mul­ti­ple requests for point­ers on how to develop a great mar­ket­ing plan – even from my spouse who’s in a mar­ket­ing strat­egy role for a major wire­less com­pany.

My ref­er­ence library was packed away, due to an office remodel, so I launched a Google search – and was under­whelmed with what I found online. There’s an amaz­ing dis­con­ti­nu­ity in the resources avail­able: a chasm between the tra­di­tional con­tents of a mar­ket­ing plan and the impli­ca­tions of the online/interactive arena, ecom­merce, and the pres­sure for mea­sur­able, account­able vehi­cles for mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties. (Need­less to say, the gap between what’s pub­licly avail­able and what’s needed is one of the rea­sons why com­pa­nies engage con­sul­tants like me.)

Here are some of the issues.

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