Developing Marketing Strategies and Plans

Key ingredients of the marketing management process are "insightful, creative strategies and plans" that can guide marketing activities.

Characteristics of a Great Marketing Company

• The company selects target markets in which it enjoys superior advantages and exits or avoids markets where it is intrinsically weak.
• Virtually all the company's employees and departments are customer and market-minded.
• There is a good working relationship between marketing, R&D, manufacturing, sales, and customer service.
• The company has incentives designed to lead to the right behaviors.
• The company continuously builds and tracks customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• The company manages a value delivery system in partnership with strong suppliers and distributors.
• The company is skilled in building its brand name(s) and image.
• The company is flexible in meeting customers' varying requirements.

A Holistic Marketing Orientation and Customer Value

1. Value exploration - How a company identifies new value opportunities.
2. Value creation - How a company efficiently creates more promising new value offerings.
3. Value delivery - How a company uses its capabilities and infrastructure to deliver the new value offerings more efficiently.

The Business Mission

Each business unit needs to define its specific mission within the broader company mission. The Business Unit Strategic Planning consists of steps shown in the following Figure.

SWOT Analysis

The overall evaluation of a company's strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats is called SWOT analysis. It is a way of monitoring the external and internal marketing environment.

Goal Formulation

Once the company has performed a SWOT analysis, it can proceed to goal formulation, developing specific goals for the planning period. Goals are objectives that are specific with respect to magnitude and time.

Strategy Formulation

Goal indicates what a business unit wants to achieve; strategy is a game plan for getting there.

Program Formulation and Implementation

Today's businesses recognize that unless they nurture other stakeholders - customers, employees, suppliers, distributors - they may never earn sufficient profits for the stockholders. A company might aim to delight its customers, perform well for its employees, and deliver a threshold level of satisfaction to its suppliers.

According to McKinsey & Company, strategy is only one of seven elements - all of which start with the letter S - in successful business practice. The first three: strategy, structure, and systems are considered the "hardware" of success. The next four: style (how employees think and behave), skills (to carry out the strategy), staff (able people who are properly trained), and shared values (values that guide employees' actions) are the "software".

Feedback and Control

Peter Drucker pointed out that it is more important to "do the right thing" - to be effective- than "to do things right" - to be efficient. The key to organizational health is willingness to examine the changing environment and adopt new goals and behaviors.

The Marketing Plan and Marketing Performance

Working within the plans set by the levels above them, product managers come up with a marketing plan for individual products, lines, brands, channels, or customer groups. Each product level, whether product line, or brand must develop a marketing plan for achieving its goals. A marketing plan summarizes what the marketer has learned about the marketplace and indicates how the firm plans to reach its marketing objectives.

Profitability Analysis

Measuring the profitability of products, territories, customer groups, segments, trade channels, and order sizes helps companies determine whether any should be changed or eliminated. Many firms now use marketing profitability analysis or its broader version, activity-based cost accounting (ABC), to quantify the true profitability of different activities. Managers can then reduce the resources required to perform various activities, make the resources more productive, acquire them at lower cost or raise prices on resource-intensive products.