The importance of planning

JUSTISIA SHIPENA
The importance of planning cannot be overemphasised for an organisation or even for an individual.

From the start of a small business, to managing a large business, from starting your own career, to the last stages of your working life, planning will be the most important tool that you use in marketing. Here are seven reasons justifying the importance of planning.

1) Better position

Whenever you plan, you plan to succeed. Thus, it is not a surprise that planning will eventually lead you to have better success and achieve a better position in the market, be it for a brand or a product. Any of your goals can have more chances of success with proper planning.

2) Progress

If you are planning to succeed, the plan will include your progress as well as the best pathway to achieve the goal. The management of the organisation always keeps goals for itself which it wants to achieve. These goals, and the subsequent planning, will always lead to the progress of the organisation. The progress of the organisation is the reason that planning is important for the management.

3) Decision-making

Whenever you make a marketing plan, you know what you want to achieve in a given timeframe. At the same time, you are clear about what the future holds for you and what the ultimate goal is. This ultimate goal, which has been decided by planning, makes your decision-making more efficient and more ‘to the point’. This is because you know how a decision will affect your plan in the long-term and whether or not this decision will help you in achieving your goals. Thus, because planning helps you decide short-term and long-term goals, it helps you make decisions faster.

4) Flexibility

The importance of planning increases in an organisation where stability has not been observed. These are typical traits of a newly formed organisation, or an organisation which is trying to rebuild itself. These organisations do not have a standard strategy. Thus, when these organisations plan ahead, they have the flexibility to adjust the growth of the organisation if any unseen events happen. So tomorrow if a competitor launches a new product, you have an answer already in the pipeline in your plan. Because of this reason, you will not panic, but instead you will just pay attention to the execution of your plans.

5) Integrated approach

Planning brings the organisation together. The importance of planning also lies in its holistic approach. Although you might make plans for different departments within the same organisation, all the departments together are trying to achieve a desired objective. Unity will always lead to success and hence the integrated approach which planning imparts to an organisation is ultimately very important.

6) Evaluation and control

One of the best things about planning is that it can be done in the boardroom. Thus, whenever you plan things, you know what are the results expected. However, you always keep a tab on the planning, so that you can at any time refer to the plan and find out whether you are on track or not. For example, your plan is to increase the sales to 2 000 units this year. This means you need to sell 500 units a quarter. However, if you are at 400 units, then you need to evaluate the options to increase sale. At the same time, if the growth is large and you are at 700 units, then you need to boost manufacturing. Thus, the importance of planning is seen when we know which factors to observe to evaluate and control the plan.

7) Achieving desired results

Planning is important, because through progress, an integrated approach, flexibility and all of the other points mentioned above, planning ultimately helps the organisation reach a desired, economically viable and profitable objective. If the plan is implemented correctly, the results will always be desirable by the organisation.

The end of the implementation of one marketing plan, is immediately followed by the implementation of another marketing plan, the process of which starts immediately with a different objective in mind. Thus, planning is important to an organisation because it gives a steady growth and prepares the organisation for a desired future. -www.marketing91.com