Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

My recommendation is to not use a turnkey solution program for marketing planning. It defeats the purpose of marketing planning. Besides the actual writing is the easy part. It's figuring out what your unique selling proposition is, developing a great positioning statement, and understanding your customers in considerable depth that make a marketing plan work. No computer program can do that.

It's like trying to write a great novel with a computer program. So far all the attempts to do that have failed. A few television series have tried the computer-assisted "formula" approach, and the writers ended up with more work fixing them than if they'd written them from scratch. (I have a cousin who is a script writer in Hollywood, and he's told me about some of the fiascos. For a while, there was a lot of work revising the computer scripts.)

If anything, a great marketing plan is more difficult to create than a novel. Stay away from the programs that ask you 1,000 questions and then generate a marketing plan for you. The thinking and creativity burden is still on you, and a good word processor can help you put the words on paper.