ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the routine steps in strategic planning and discusses how a marketer's approach to total quality management may provide companies with an edge in the marketplace. These steps, routinely called a marketing plan, enable a company to communicate its strategy decisions throughout the organization. Executive summary provides a brief review of the strategy and its implications for top management and directors. The strategic plan builds the foundation for gathering data on the marketplace, uncontrollable market forces, and those forces that a company can alter based on its strategy. Total quality management allows the marketer to gauge the strength or size of opportunities and issues. Many of these team-based programs, which began in the late 1970s, were prompted by the marketing strategy plan: action programs. The contingency plan is a mini marketing plan developed to counter any external or internal competitive force that has a strong probability of affecting the accepted strategy.
