How Marketing Planning Builds Internal Networks

The benefits of marketing planning have been widely documented in the marketing literature. It seems, however, that these benefits are not always readily achieved and concerns have been expressed about the difficulty of implementing marketing planning. A partial solution to these implementation difficulties may be found in the relationship marketing literature. Research in this area suggests that relationships of all kinds play an important facilitating role in different marketing activities. This raises interesting questions about the role which relationships in general, and internal partnerships in particular, play in implementing marketing planning. This article uses a 3-year industrial manufacturing case study to examine the implementation of marketing planning and consider the role which internal partnerships play. So that the theoretical context of the research can be understood, the article begins by reviewing the marketing planning and relationship marketing literature. This is followed by a year-by-year review of the industrial case study, placing particular attention on the internal relationships. The findings confirm that, in this case, internal partnerships and the relationships associated with them, play a vital role in the planning process. More specifically, the results propose that internal relationships should be regarded both as an input to and an output of the marketing planning process.