Fully updated and in full colour throughout 'The Marketing Plan in Colour: A pictorial guide for managers' is a unique approach to this complex subject, which will both aid understanding and at the same time encourage marketing and other professionals to delve deeper into the planning process. After more than fifty years of marketing theory and practice, marketing planning still remains one of the great, unconquered challenges. This challenge continues to grow as the environments in which companies operate become increasingly hostile, abrasive and dynamic. There is a growing body of evidence to show that the difference between an organization's efficiency and effectiveness (or, in planning terms, the difference between tactics and strategy) is becoming more and more important. Today, successful chief executives and management teams are grasping the absolute necessity of understanding where their companies should be going, with this direction properly articulated in plans that identify and develop those things that make a company significantly and profitably different over time. It is not difficult to spot those organizations that have not adopted this strategic planning orientation. They reorganize with regular monotony, and more and more such firms are being taken over by more enterprising ones that have learned to drive using the strategic planning approach. Such marketing planning will never be easy. Indeed, it grows more difficult by the day. Thousands of readers of the black and white version of this title (in print since 1987) testify to the easy-to-use approach illustrated by a leading cartoonist.