Market Planning: Getting it Right

Even if you're not interested in pursuing VC funding, the marketing plan is going to be crucial to your ISP's success. So, what is the marketing plan supposed to do for your company? Marketing's ultimate goal is to create an environment that generates and maximizes sales. But for truly market-driven companies, the marketing plan will define your products, your territories, your corporate image, and even your customers. To accomplish all of these, your marketing plan must lay out minimum standards, strategies and contingencies for dealing with a variety of market forces. It is here, however, where most of us get lost.

A good example of folks getting lost without a plan is the advent of free ISPs like NetZero. Nearly all ISPs have been caught off guard by this monstrosity as it gobbles up customers by the thousands each day. Most ISP's haven't a clue as to how to deal with such a competitive threat and instead keep going on as if the free ISP didn't exist. 'There's enough room for everyone' the experts quip, hoping they're right. A good marketing plan (written by a savvy marketing person) would spell out just exactly how to deal with such competitors.

The marketing plan must be dynamic—changing with market forces and new information. The more quickly you change and adapt the plan's various models with the market, the more likely you will be able to survive in a volatile market. Compaq is a recent example of a big company that has been slow to adapt its marketing (and pricing) within a rapidly changing environment. Its bottom line suffered and the CEO was summarily fired. Although Compaq makes what is arguably one of the best PC's on the market, relying on premium pricing and positioning appears to be passé within the consumer markets, and Compaq's bottom line reflected this.

Your company can have an extremely compelling product or service, but if you can't communicate the benefits and show that some kind of market demand exists for your business's services in light of your competitors' services, like Compaq, you will lose the war. Many businesses have come and gone whose products were tremendous but in the end failed to "compete" with their competitors' superior marketing ability. This is nowhere more pronounced than in the ISP industry, where there is certainly no shortage of competitors.

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