“The marketing plan is to company success as a road map is to car travel. It is the key from strategy to tactics. It can act as a tracking mechanism, it can determine the budget, and it can be a scale against which the company measures marketing effectiveness. It is an internal communications tool that everyone consults to know where the business is going and how it plans to get there.”

Kevin J. Clancy and Peter C. Krieg (2000), Counterintuitive Marketing