What Is Marketing Planning - Essay Example

Marketing Planning is also defined as the process that motivates the marketing personnel to look internally to fully understand the results of past marketing decisions and to look externally to fully understand the market in which they operate. It also sets future goals and provides direction for future marketing efforts that everyone within the organization should understand and support. It is a key component in obtaining funding to pursue new initiatives. SBU stands for Strategic Business Unit.

It is one of the crucial components in marketing planning. SBU is understood as a business unit within the overall corporate identity which is identifiable from other businesses because it serves a defined external market where management can conduct strategic planning about products and markets. When companies become large, they are best thought of as being composed of several SBUs. An SBU is a unit of the company that has a separate mission and objectives and that can be planned independently from the other businesses.

An SBU can be a company division, a product line, or even individual brands and it all depends on how the company is organized. An independent grouping of organizations, products, or technologies within a parent organization, with complete resource and profit responsibility for serving an identified market (FN1). These organizational entities are large enough and homogeneous enough to exercise control over most strategic factors affecting their performance. They are managed as self-contained planning units for which separate business strategies can be developed.

A Strategic Business Unit can encompass an entire company, or can simply be a smaller part of a company set up to perform a specific task. The SBU has its own business strategy, objectives, and competitors and these will be different from those of the parent company.