Make a marketing plan in one hour. Is it another digital joke!?

I was caught on an email with a newsletter from AppSumo who I subscribed the other day. As usual, I have always been await for their new deals that come in handy, but today’s update seems a bit weird to me. The deal is about a new video on helping you write a marketing plan in one hour by Paul Hontz and Jason Kehrer.

Here is the link: http://www.appsumo.com/jason-kehrer-one-hour-marketing-action-video/

The opening sentence is: “Jason Kehrer shows you how to build your marketing plan (and a bunch of other stuff) in an hour. Don’t spend weeks on stuff that should take hours”. I don’t know whether most of the people fall convinced by this headline, but to me it sounds really weird in terms of seriousness. My definition of a marketing plan is something that would take you weeks to accomplish if you’re making a serious go about your own business. Believing or not, I do agree that this title is somehow attractive and easy to get people convinced, and this is part of advertising as well. However, critically, do you really want to prepare a marketing plan in just a few hours?

No, I suppose.  Actually, (I guess) what they want to ship to you is more about how to efficiently write a marketing plan, that cuts off some of the bottlenecks while developing it. They might also teach you how to structure the plan and all the different yet useful techniques. And that’s it. That holds true. However, what’s also true is the fact that all of the dot points that they listed would probably take you days and days to get them done, not just a structure itself. What I mean is the title of this deal seems a bit ambiguous to the readers and the way the authors attract them (the readers) is by making a marketing plan appear less serious than it really is, which is less or more not very useful.

It reminds me of the time I was in high school SIC. My favorite business teacher Keith Kirchner spent a lot of his effort to get the most out of our marketing lessons. I also remember that we had to develop a simple marketing plan as a course’s major project, and it lasted for 3 weeks (we covered executive summary, cost estimation, distribution and networks, profiling, pricing strategies and a few more). We all were excited to get the idea onto papers, and to thoroughly discuss it in a student manner. It has been proven to me that a real marketing plan doesn’t seem to be that easy to get it done in one hour (even an unrealistic high school project did last for 3 weeks). Only those who are not serious about what they’re doing, will think the way that I don’t.

Hence, the motive of making the deal is alright, but the way they title it is not as ok, at least in my opinion.