Customer Reviews

The One-Day Marketing Plan

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This book lives up to neither its "one-day" promise nor its claim to help you organize and complete a plan that works.

The problem? Lack of examples. The worksheets are utterly blank, and the text speaks in vague, hand-waving generalities. Because of this substance gap, the book is hard to use to the point of being completely unhelpful.

The obvious audience for this book is people who are new to marketing, and certainly people who are new to writing marketing plans. And if those people are purchasing a book to help them step-by-step, it is generally because they don't have access to an existing marketing plan that they can work from and modify. Those people won't be helped by this book; they won't have any way to figure out what they should fill in in the very blank worksheets.

That said, I can think of a circumstance for which this book might be genuinely helpful: if you have an existing marketing plan, and you're trying to figure out if there are things that you've missed, the lists of questions that different sections of your plan should answer would be a good way to test completeness.

But overall, I found the book extremely disappointing.

Far better guides to marketing can be had in books like "Crossing the Chasm" (which provides a great conceptual basis from which to start).

I am looking at this book as the director of my own small marketing firm (not a multinational corporation). I am always looking for introductory information about marketing plans that will be a good fit for small businesses, like many of my clients have. This book is not it.

The One Day Marketing Plan is over 300 wordy pages long. Yes, there are dozens of worksheets, but I can't imagine how anyone could digest and put into practice even part of this book in a day.

This book slowly drags the reader through a very traditional approach to developing a marketing plan. It would help anyone to ask lots of questions before marketing a product or service. On the other hand, there is a serious danger for many of us in small business to give in to the "paralysis of analysis". That's why we look for a "one day" approach. Most entrepreneurs don't need, can't afford, and are probably incapable of performiung a long, detailed study without formal training. Besides, it's usually overkill.

As an alternative, I like "The Instant Marketing Plan" by Mark Nolan, and "The Guerilla Marketing Workbook" by Levinson and Godin.