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To achieve a full understanding of the role of marketing from plan to profit requires a knowledge of the basic building blocks. This textbook introduces the key concepts in the art or science of marketing to practising managers. Understanding your customers and consumers, the 4 Ps (Product, Place, Price and Promotion) provides the basic tools for effective marketing. Deploying your resources and informing your managerial decision making is dealt with in Unit VII introducing marketing intelligence, competition, budgeting and organisational issues. The logical conclusion of this effort is achieving sales and the particular techniques involved are explored in the final section.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the evolution of crisis communication and management along with its inclusion into the field and practice of emergency management. This paper also discusses the inclusion of nonprofit organizations and the need for these organizations to engage in crisis communication planning and strategy creation to address the diverse and numerous crises that nonprofits are at risk of experiencing.

This paper utilizes a systematic literature review of crisis communication planning tools and resources focused on nonprofit organizations to derive best practices and policy needs.

The resources analyzed provide foundational insight for nonprofit organizations to proactively develop plans and strategies during noncrisis periods to support their organization when a crisis occurs.

Limitations of this paper include limited academic research and practical resources related to nonprofit organizations and crisis communication planning. As such, several potential avenues for empirical research are discussed.

This paper provides considerations for nonprofit organizations engaging in crisis communication planning and aspects leaders need to partake in to reduce or eliminate the risk of facing an operational or reputational crisis.

This paper highlights the critical need to generate a crisis communication plan due to the diverse crises nonprofit organizations face and their connection to the emergency management structure. Understanding the crisis and utilizing a crisis communication plan allows nonprofit organizations a way to strategically mitigate the impact of a crisis while also providing essential services to their respective communities and maintain their overall stability.

This paper is unique in its analysis of crisis communication planning resources and creation of a planning framework to assist nonprofit organizations in their planning efforts.

Purpose – Libraries have been experiencing relentless change and uncertainty in their environment. The literature on corporate communications, strategic management and planning, marketing and public relations more recently, has been recommending using communications as a strategy to coherently and proactively handle and foresee change. Planning and using an overall communications strategy will bring integrity and adherence to the library's goals and direction while reducing the discomfort of change. This selected bibliography is a quick starting point for understanding the significance of an overall communication strategy and its use for managing conflicts and changes in the library's environment strategically. Design/methodology/approach – This article covers books and articles from mid‐1980s to 2004, published around the world. The sources are listed alphabetically by author and then chronologically for different sources by the same author, providing brief but useful information about the content covered for each source. Findings – This bibliography illustrates a variety of research from corporate communications, strategic planning, communications management, marketing and public relations literature that emphasize the role of communication in strategic management. Research limitations/implications – It records a comprehensive list of publications covering international perspectives as well as publications about communication strategy. Practical implications – This selected bibliography is primarily intended for librarians, library planners, managers or administrators, but is also relevant to corporate and business professionals, planners and administrators. Further, it would also be a useful resource for students, faculty and researchers of communication. Originality/value – This bibliography presents a much needed resource list for gathering insights into the strategic role of communication for organizations such as the library that are in a state of constant change.

In this study, we applied the strategy-as-practice (SAP) framework to analyse strategic communication practices. SAP implies approaching strategy as something that organisational members do and is useful for understanding the tensions between emergence and formalisation and between planning and improvisation that characterise the everyday communication work of communication practitioners.

The paper is based on an ethnographic study of a record company and on qualitative interviews with various actors from the music industry.

Tensions exist between the emergence of inputs from active consumers that require flexibility and attempts to strategically formalise and continuously adapt plans and encourage consumers to act in anticipated ways. The findings revealed five strategic communication practices—meetings, working in the office, gathering and analysing consumer engagement and related data, collaboration and storytelling—that practitioners used to conduct strategic communication and navigate the tensions.

The study contributes to understanding the role of strategic communication practices in contemporary organisations and how practitioners manage the tensions within them. The study shows that an SAP approach can account for improvisation and emergence, as well as planning and formalisation. It also shows how SAP resonates with emergent and agile strategic communication frameworks.

Crisis planning, which symbolizes an organization's crisis preparedness and often conceptualized at the corporate headquarters, is increasingly decentralized to regional centers of global companies. These centers, in turn, synchronize their crisis master plans with its national units for expeditious management of localized crises. The purpose of this paper is to capture the decision‐making processes that practitioners at a regional center faced as they nurtured their master plan from conception to implementation.

The qualitative method is used. This is a case study of a Fortune 500 company with plants in every continent. The company has four regional centers, and the center under study oversees more than 20 national units or countries.

This study found a deep divide in attitude, expectation, and style between what practitioners and the dominant coalition regarded as necessary and sufficient measures in crisis planning.

Restricted access to more interviewees.

Studies like this, grounded in the practitioner's world, add rich layers of context to understanding how theory and practice can integrate. Given that in this study, corporate communications has been found to be regarded as an auxiliary, rather than ancillary, function in this study, this paper offers practical tips on what practitioners can do to transform organizational perception.

Such studies are rare because of the lack of accessibility to data. Practitioners are hesitant to grant access because of the highly sensitive nature of this topic, for fear of reprisals from their organizations, and an inadvertent revelation of organizational privacy and secrets.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of account planning by tracing its origins, development and role from its genesis to its current status. Account planning grew out of dissatisfaction with advertising agencies’ ability to meet the challenges they were facing in the early 1960s. It started out by combining elements of research and strategic planning to inform creative development and to provide the guidance and direction needed to use consumer insight to drive successful creative solutions. Since those early beginnings, a changing advertising environment has fuelled account planning’s exodus as it has been adopted internationally and by marketing communications fields that extend beyond advertising. While the paper brings us to the current day, account planning continues to evolve. It is expected that the trend of adoption by a range of marketing communications specialist agencies will persist but that a new account planning “revelation” will be in the form of independent strategy consultancies and increased client activities.

The need for a more overt marketing orientation within planned shopping centres in the UK has been noted by various authors. However, the management orientation of planned shopping centres has been described as property‐ rather than customer‐led. This article considers the role of marketing for planned shopping centres, with particular reference to regional shopping centres (RSCs). The emphasis of marketing activity in this context is primarily promotional, and the process by which promotional activities are planned and implemented by RSCs is considered and contrasted with Fill's model of the marketing communications planning process.

Semi‐structured interviews were undertaken with marketing managers in four of the nine RSCs in the UK (two interviews were face‐to‐face, one interview was by telephone and one interview was via e‐mail). These exploratory interviews sought to identify: respondents’ perceptions of marketing and the role of the marketing function within the organisation; the nature of the marketing/promotional objectives that were set; the identity of the target audiences for marketing/promotional activity; the process by which this activity was planned; and the specific marketing/promotional tools used. All the interviews were analysed using the template analysis technique.

Findings are reported under the following headings: role of marketing; perceptions of marketing; marketing planning; target audiences/objectives; promotional activities; and evaluation.

This research is exploratory, comprising four interviews (however, there are only nine RSCs in the UK). More detailed research into the processes of marketing communications planning in this context should be implemented.

This paper shows how general models relating to theoretical aspects of marketing (in this case marketing communications planning), may need to be amended to reflect the practical reality of specific market contexts and the discussion section of the paper outlines this in more detail.

Following on from the above point, the paper provides a framework for marketing communications planning in the specific context of RSCs in the UK. As such, it has resonance for the practice of marketing in all planned retail developments.

A key to the effective implementation of strategic plans is the communication of the strategic plans to executives in functional areas. A study of eighteen organizations revealed that their functional executives’ knowledge of the strategic plan was closely tied to their corporate planners’ assessment of the quality of the communication of the plan. In contrast, the functional executives’ knowledge was not so closely tied to the planners’ assessment of merely the quality of the business plan itself.Different organizations use different communication tactics. These tactics suggest practical actions to enable strategic planners to improve the communication of their plans.