ABSTRACT
This chapter is in effect a continuation of the last, but deals with how marketers should go about their business (process) rather than the tools they use (the marketing mix). The perspective changes but some of the issues remain the same, such as the need to know more about Chinese markets rather than simply handing marketing over to local affiliates, and the difficulty of acquiring reliable factual information. The latter is particularly critical. As Sunzi pointed out 2,500 years ago, apart from focus, the other key to winning battles is having, and using, superior information. A plan built on poor information is as useless as perfect information which is not acted upon. So what is new? Fifty years of practising and teaching marketing has
convinced one author of this book (and the others are quite prepared to believe it) that every marketing plan ever written fails one or both of Sunzi’s tests. As another great strategist, the Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke, remarked, ‘No plan ever survives contact with the enemy’. We would amend that to simply, ‘No plan ever survives’. But that is no reason not to plan: it is just that planning is merely
practice and no amount of practice can produce the perfect plans for unpredictable markets. This chapter returns to the subject of market research, discussed
briefly in Chapter 1. We then look at other information and discuss a practical strategy for integrating information needs. There is a tendency, in writing about business in China, to note guanxi as some sort of local peculiarity, and then get back to business as usual. We think
it needs to be made intrinsic to the whole planning process. Here we make suggestions how.
