Beginning in the late 1960s, James Stevenson was the president of a San Diego-based advertising and public relations firm and served as president of the San Diego Association of Advertising Agencies. During the 1970s and 1980s he was a consultant to Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, a division of United Technologies, ABC and CBS on defense-related documentaries, five divisions of Loral Corporation, and editor of the Navy Fighter Weapons School's Topgun Journal.
As a result of his experience with his advertising and defense-related clients, Stevenson observed that when implementation plans occasionally failed, their failure often lay in the lack of a soundly based marketing strategy. Consequently, he shifted his emphasis from working solely on the implementation phase to offer both planning and implementation services.
He began Strategic Planning Group in 1982, to specialize in providing marketing planning and implementation to high technology, aerospace, and companies that rely on computer-related solutions to their marketing.
In 1992, Stevenson took a seven-year sabbatical to write two books. The first, The Pentagon Paradox, was a history of the acquisition of the F-18 Hornet, published by the Naval Institute Press in 1993. The second book, The $5 Billion Misunderstanding, is a history of the failed acquisition of the Navy's A-12 stealth bomber. The Naval Institute Press published it in 2001.
With the advent of the Internet, marketing communication budgets began looking to the Internet as a source of advertising. At first, companies were looking only to appear as close to the top of the search engine results page. But eventually, these search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN (to name only the top three) evolved into a complete selling medium with Google's AdWords program leading the pack. As a result, Strategic Planning Group, LLC began focusing on website development and the complexities of search engine optimization and search engine marketing.
Strategic Planning Group, LLC has helped numerous companies throughout the country with their marketing planning and implementation.