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 a lways readily achieved and concerns have been expressed about the diff iculty of implementing marketing planning. A partial solution to these implementation difficulties may be found in the relationship marketin g literature. Research in this area suggests that relationships of all kinds play an important facilitating role in different marketing acti vities. This raises interesting questions about the role which relatio nships in general, and internal partnerships in particular, play in im plementing marketing planning. This article uses a 3-year industrial m anufacturing case study to examine the implementation of marketing pla nning 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 industri al case study, placing particular attention on the internal relationsh ips. The findings confirm that, in this case, internal partnerships an d the relationships associated with them, play a vital role in the pla nning process. More specifically, the results propose that internal re lationships should be regarded both as an input to and an output of th e marketing planning process. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.