The marketing department’s job B to plan and control marketing activity four types of marketing control can be distinguished.

1. Annual plan control

2. Profitability control

3. Efficiency control

4. Strategic control

1. Annual plan control

The purpose of annual plan control is to ensues that the company achieves the sales, profit and other goals established in its annual plan. The heart of annual plan control is management by objectives . four steps are involved. First, management sets monthly or quarterly goals. Second, management monitors its performance in the market place. Third, management determines the causes of serious performance deviations. Fourth , management takes corrective action to close the gaps between its goals and performance.

Managers use various tools to check on plan performance; sales analysis, market share analysis , marketing expense to share analysis and customer attitude tracking.

A) Sales Analysis: sales analysis consists of measuring and evaluating actual sales in relation to sales goals.

B) Market share Analysis: company sales do not reveal how well the company. If the company ‘s market share goes up. The company is gaining on competitors; if it goes down, the company is losing relative to competitors.

C) Marketing Expense to Sales Analysis: annual plan control requires making sure that the company is not overspending to achieve its sales goals. The key ratio is to watch is marketing expense to sales. The are five components in expense to sales ratio:-

1) sales force to sales

2) Advertising to sales

3) marketing research to sales and

4)sales administration to sales.

D) Customer Satisfaction: tracking alert concpanter set up systems to monitor the attitude and satisfaction of customers, dealers and other market system participants, by monitoring changing levels of customers preference and satisfaction before they affect sales, management can take earlier action. The main customer satisfaction tracking system are:-

1) complaint and suggestion system:- market oriented companies record, analyze and respond to written and oral complaints that come from the customer.

2) customer panel:- some companies run panels of customers who have agreed to communicate there attitude periodically through phone calls or mail questionnaires

3) customer surveys; – some companies periodically mail questionnaire to a random saeuple of customer to evaluate the friendliness of the staff, the quality of service etc