Strategic marketing planning is adopted by businesses-tobusiness organizations from all sectors (McDonald, 2002). Firms use this approach to develop a marketing strategy and a tactical plan which becomes the framework for directing, implementing and controlling marketing activities (Claycomb, Germain, & Dröge, 2000). With its focus on marketing activities, marketing planning is clearly distinct from strategic business planning, which takes a broader view of corporate goals and the strategic and tactical choices through which these can be achieved (Byars & Neil, 1987).

Marketing planning principles are well established (Gilligan & Wilson, 2004; Greenley, Hooley, & Saunders, 2004) and research shows that marketing planning is adopted by most large businesses and many small and medium sized enterprises (Brooksbank, 1999; Dibb & Simkin, 1997). With evidence that successful marketing strategies and the application of planning approaches are linked (Brooksbank, 1991), the use of marketing plans is now widely endorsed in the literature (Claycomb et al., 2000; Jain, 2002). Confirmation of the specific benefits of formal marketing planning for business-to-business organizations has also been reported (cf: Ford, 2001; Gross, Banting, Meredith, & Ford, 1993).

Despite the reported advantages of marketing planning (Greenley et al., 2004; Hutt & Speh, 2003), practitioners often find that careful management is needed to achieve the claimed benefits. All too often, firms engaged in marketing planning find that their progress is impeded by a variety of implementation barriers (Simkin, 2002). Business-to-business organizations are no exception. Among the many reasons for these problems the need for a systematic and robust marketing planning process is a recurring theme (Gilligan & Wilson, 2004).