What Are The Barriers To Effective Marketing Planning?

Planning is the fundamental element of management that predetermines what the business proposes

to accomplish and how it intends in realizing its goals. In other words, planning involves those activities of management that determine the mission and goals of an organization, the ways in which these are to be accomplished, and the deployment of the necessary resources to realize them. In short planning entails a systematic and intelligent exposition of the direction a business organization must follow to accomplish predetermined goals.
Planning encapsulates the following three dimensions:
 The determination dimension: The business must determine what it wants to achieve by a specific date in future. This means that goals have to be formulated that will serve as guidelines for the business and its various departments and sub-departments.
 The decision-making dimension: The goals determine the actions that are necessary, or the way in which they might be accomplished.
 The future dimension: A goal is something to be accomplished in the future. Planning establishes a connection between the things that have to be done now to bring about a certain situation in the future.”
 As a fundamental element of management, planning is not only the starting point of the management process, but in a sense also the point around which management activities revolves. The goals and the plans determine the type of organization needed, the leadership required, and the control to be exercised to steer the business as productively as possible towards its goals.”

My own statement about planning: “Planning include the organizations objectives or goals, establishing an overall strategy for achieving those goals, and developing a comprehensive structure of plans to integrate and coordinate activities.”

The focus on the first question will be to identify the barriers to effective planning and the measurements to overcome the barriers.

First part: Identify barriers to effective planning:

Stephen P. Robbins and David A. Decency (2004: 79 & 80) identify the following barriers to effective planning:
 “Planning may create rigidity: Formal planning efforts can lock an organization into specific goals to be achieved within specific timetables. When these objectives were set, the assumption may have been made that the environment wouldnt’t change during the time period the objectives cover. If that assumption is faulty, managers who follow a plan may have trouble. Rather than remaining flexible- and possibly scrapping the plan-managers who continue to do what is required to achieve the original objectives may not be able to cope with the changed environment. Forcing a course of action when the environment is fluid can be a recipe for disaster.
 Plans can’t be developed for a dynamic environment: Today most organizations face dynamic change in their environments. If a basic assumption in making plans-that the environment won’t change-is faulty, then how can one make plans? We describe today’s business environment as chaotic, by definition, that means random and unpredictable. Managing chaos and turning disasters into opportunities require flexibility, and that may mean not being tied to formal plans