Company and Marketing Strategy

a.      Company – wide strategic planning
·       Strategic planning: the process of developing and maintaining a strategic fit between the organization’s goals and capabilities and its changing marketing opportunities.

·         Steps :

1.      Defining the company mission.

2.      setting company objectives and goals.

3.      designing the business portfolio.

4.      planning marketing and other functional strategies (business unit, product, and market level).

·         Mission statement: a statement of the organization’s purpose, what is wants to accomplish in the larger environment. In other words, to satisfying basic customer needs.

·         Business objectives :

-      Build profitable customer relationships

-      Invest in research

-      Improve profits

·         Marketing objectives :

-      Increase market shape

-      Create local partnerships

-      Increase promotion

·         Business portfolio

o   the collection of businesses and products that make up the company.

o   2 steps of business portofolio planning:

1.      Analyzing the Current Business Portfolio

§  Portofolio analysis: management evaluates the products and businesses that make up the company.

§  Strategic business unit (SBUs): key businesses that make up the company. (company division, product line within a division, single product or brand)

§  3 steps of portofolio analysis:

1.      identify SBUs.

2.      Asses the attractiveness of its various SBUs.

3.      Decide how much support each SBU deserves.

2.      Developing Strategies for Growth and Downsizing

§  Product or market expansion grid: a portfolio planning tool for identifying company growth opportunities through market penetration, market development, product development, or diversification.

§  Downsizing: the reduction of the business portfolio by eliminating products or business units that are not profitable or that no longer fit the company’s overall strategy.

b.      Planning marketing

·         Partnering with other company departments

o   Value chain: the series of internal departments that carry out value creating activities to design, produce, deliver, and support a firm’s products.

o   Value delivery network: made up of the company, its suppliers, its distributors, smf ultimately is to improve performance of the entire system.

c.       Marketing Strategy and Marketing Mix

·         Marketing strategy: the marketing logic by which the company hopes to create this customer value and achieve these profitable relationships.

·         Customer-driven marketing strategy

o   Marketing segmentation: dividing a market into distinct groups of buyers who have different needs, characteristics, or behaviour, and who might require seperate products or marketing mix.

o   Market segment: a group of consumers who respond in a similar way to given set of marketing efforts.

o   Market targeting: the process of evaluating each market segments’s attractiveness and selecting one or more segments to enter.

o   Positioning: arranging for a product to occupy a clear, distinctive, and desireable place relative to competing products in the minds of the target consumer.

o   Differentiation: actually differentiating the market offering to create superior customer value.

·         Marketing mix: the set of tactical marketing tools-product, price, place, and promotion-that the firm blends to produce the response it wants in the target market.

a.      Maketing Analysis

·         SWOT analysis :

·         an overall evaluation of the company’s strengths (S), weaknesses (W), opportunities (O), and threats (T).

·         Internal :

o   Strengths: internal capabilities that may help a company reach its objectives.

o   Weaknesses: internal limitations that may interfere with company’s ability to achieve its objectives.

·         External :

o   Opportunities: external factors that the company may be able to exploit to its advantage.

o   Threats : current and emerging external factors that may challenge the company’s performance.

b.      Managing the marketing effort

·         Marketing planning

o   Contents of a marketing plan:

·         Marketing implementation: turning marketing strategies and plans into marketing actions to accomplish strategic marketing objectives.

·         Marketing control: measuring and evaluating the results of marketing strategies and plans and taking corrective action to ensure that objectives are achieved

·         Return on marketing invesment (marketing ROI): the net return from a marketing invesment divided by the costs of the marketing invesment. (provides a measurement of the profits generated by invesments in marketing activities.)