Review

Created: December, 1999

Palo Alto Software's Marketing Plan Pro is a step-by-step guide to creating a competent and professional marketing plan for your business.

This software is for beginners to marketing and computing. It instructs novices how to navigate through the software and the market planning process.

Marketing Plan Pro's task manager option lays out the entire market planning process from start to finish. Instructions explain why you do each step and provide sample entries that illustrate exactly what information you are expected to enter. The end product is a comprehensive marketing document that will keep employees, supply chain partners, investors and customers alert to your company's marketing efforts.

The program incorporates a word processor, a spreadsheet and an expansive marketing tutorial to help you design a professional marketing program. The tutorial information is the real gem here, offering a full explanation of each step and, in the process, providing an informal marketing education.

Effective? Yes. Does what it claims to do? Yes. Exciting? Not really. Marketing Plan Pro fails to communicate to its users why they need this program. Unlike its sister product, Business Plan Pro, which clearly assists its users in creating a business plan for investors and financing purposes, Marketing Plan Pro does not clearly have an audience.

If you are successful at marketing, if you are educated in marketing, if you have done background research into creating a marketing plan, Marketing Plan Pro might fall into the category of redundancy.

Sure, the budgeting option is effective and the milestone establishes deadlines for various marketing activities. But having gone through each step to plan marketing efforts for a fictitious, self-created International Widgets Incorporated, this reviewer was left with a feeling that something was missing -- a reason to use the program in the first place.

Marketing Plan Pro is well designed and easy to use. It is effective as a primer course that teaches small business professionals how to create and refine a marketing plan. With a price under $100, it offers newcomers to marketing an easy way to develop a plan to engage customers.

More utility is needed in order to recommend this program, however, because anyone with marketing textbook, a word processor and a spreadsheet could do without it.

Reviewer's rating 3.5 / 5

Comments: Shows users how to create a marketing plan. If you already know how to do that and have a word processor and spreadsheet, you can pass.

Price: $89.95 US, $135 Canadian