Why are we suggesting a book that focuses on marketing and business management?
Because as a Learning & Development professional you need to understand how to promote L&D to your business, engage employees and ensure they know how much value you offer.
This book is now in its 7th edition and this goes a long way towards showing you that it is still heavily in demand and useful to many. The book takes you through a step by step guide of creating a marketing plan, raising many important questions along the way. By putting the stages of the marketing plan in this formulaic approach, it ensures that anyone new to marketing or even those more experienced in it will consider everything needed to cover every angle.
The book is heavily recommended by a substantial amount of university courses and is often considered to be essential reading but that doesn’t mean it is only useful for those studying a degree. Anyone who is starting a business or looking to expand the marketing capabilities of their current business will find it an excellent resource as it explains many marketing concepts clearly.
The structure of the book is very simple – each chapter represents each stage of a marketing plan. The book then gives you detailed help for each section in order. The book has plenty of definitions down the side which makes picking up keywords easy. The book is therefore very easy to follow and if you were creating your marketing plan as you went along the chapters you would have a very thorough plan by the end of the book.
The thing I most like about the book was its use of case studies and real life examples. Too often do books explain the academic theory without giving it any context – leaving you to think the theory is all well and good but does it work in practice? McDonald always ensures he anchors the theories with real life application. The book’s title is a good indicator of this – it doesn’t just teach you how to prepare a marketing plan but also how to actually use them. It is this which separates it apart from the rest.
There are a few drawbacks to the book as well. Firstly the book is extremely large and can sometimes seem a bit daunting to read. It is probably unrealistic to expect to read the entire book as it is 592 pages and the pages are large. Therefore it is important to identify the parts that will be of most value to you. Also, the pages can often be text heavy. Again this can make reading it quite over aweing as there are few images and diagrams to break up the text for large portions of the book. More of these could have made the book more appealing to visual learners.
To summarise, the book is an excellent resource to anybody looking to either create a brand new marketing plan from scratch or looking to fill in the gaps of their current one. The language and structure is very easy to follow meaning you don’t have to have a huge amount of marketing experience to follow the terminology. The slight drawback of the book however is its size and amount of text. Although this shows there is a lot of information it can give you – it can also be daunting and difficult to fit into your schedule. However, I would still highly recommend it as a useful resource to pick up whenever you have the time.
