Bonoma Implementation Model Concept
Bonoma Implementation Model, developed by Thomas Bonoma, professor at Harvard Business School, has as aim to diagnose problems in marketing strategy implementation and verify eventual problems of the marketing plans and help to develop plans to avoid them. According to Bonoma, the main reason for planning failures is in the poor implementation. In a study performed in 35 companies, Bonoma identified four types of implementation problems, each one of them corresponding to a different level. From there resulted the model that can be used to measure the capacity of a company to implement a marketing plan or to make the implementation phase more solid and effective.
Bonoma’s model divides the marketing plan implementation in four levels and identifies the most frequent questions at each level. Following are presented each one of the identified levels:
- Level 1 – Policy: policy is, normally of the responsibility of the general director and marketing and sales directors and consists on a group of formal and informal guidelines through which the managers lead the strategy performance. The most common problem at this level is the inexistence of a clear vision of the desired direction for the marketing strategy. According to Bonoma, companies should have a strong and clear “marketing mission”.
- Level 2 – Systems: systems are usually of the responsibility of the marketing and sales managers and of the accountancy responsible, of the information processing and include budgeting, organizational structure, cost control, income control, and others information systems which involve the marketing directors, personnel and sales. The systems’ strictness is pointed by Bonoma as the most common problem at this level – many times, the established systems lead the company through the habitual paths, even when the good sense shows a different direction.
- Level 3 – Programs: programs are usually of the responsibility of the marketing director, product managers, Sales managers and responsible for publicity and refer to the coordinated sales and strategy implementation programs. The distance between the programs and reality of the company and its surrounding is the most common problem pointed by Bonoma at this level.
- Level 4 – Duties: duties are normally under the responsibility of the sales managers, publicity and distributions and include basic marketing tasks, namely sales, communication, distribution and client service. The loss of contact among the managers perform the planning and specificities of each duty which implements it leads to the use of false assumptions in the plans definition, being this the main problem at this level.
