ABSTRACT
Once the business has agreed its mission statement, the long-term planning process must set out how the mission is to be fulfilled. In the long term it is possible for a company to plan to change existing allocations of resources and to remove current constraints, such as lack of access to distribution channels, on the business even if such changes will take time to achieve. This is the most fundamental difference between long-term (strategic) planning and short-term (tactical) budgeting. In a plan for the next 12 months it will be impossible to make fundamental changes to many aspects of marketing strategy as the time needed to effect changes (the lead time) is greater than the 12-month planning period. If the corporate objective for growth can only be attained by launching new products, the level of this growth will be constrained by the time-scale of product developments and this may preclude any significant new product launches in the next 12 months. For longer-term plans, the company could increase the resources dedicated to product development so that these time-scales may be reduced, or it could examine the potential for buying in new products from other companies, etc. as ways of removing the constraint to growth.
