University of South Wales

Business School
MK4S34-V1 - Strategic Marketing

Masters in Business Administration (MBA)

Instructor: Apostolos Pistolas

Student Number: R1508D933901

Assignment Question:

Provide a critical self-reflection of the process of completing assignment 1.

Word Count: 1119

1|Page
This essay seeks to provide a critical self-reflection of the process that I took in completing
assignment 1 of this module which focused on Amazon’s strategic marketing process being
informed by the customer’s needs and wants. It also seeks to show how this module has been
very helpful in my learning experience and how it has changed my professional thought
process. It is important to note that this module has been focused on teaching me how to
understand and critically evaluate the key constructs associated with Strategic Marketing.
Strategic Marketing, as defined by Toman (2011), is “the way a firm effectively differentiates
itself from its competitors by capitalising on its strengths (both current and potential) to
provide consistently better value to customers than its competitors.” In order to establish how
Amazon took cognisance of the customer’s voice in its strategic marketing decisions, a lot of
reading and research was key.

It was of the utmost importance that I understood and evaluated how strategic marketing
interfaced with Amazon’s general business strategy and to do so involved analysing
SOSTAC planning model tool to understand and review Amazon’s position and business
strategy. This assignment will only mention a few. SOSTAC is an acronym for Situation
Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Action and Control. Through the Situation Analysis
of SOSTAC I managed to establish Amazon’s background and present position. This
established how Amazon began merely as “an eBook provider to emerging as the 2 nd largest
e-commerce company in the world,” (Bhasin, 2017). The analysis also provided information
on Amazon’s SWOT analysis, customer base and competitor analysis. The information on
Amazon’s growth showed that whatever marketing objectives it was employing were proving
to be very successful in its expansion.

Through the Objectives, I managed to uncover Amazon’s set mission, vision and goals. The
mission and vision of a company direct all operations relating to the business and having
established these for Amazon as “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where
customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavours to
offer its customers the lowest possible prices,” and “To leverage technology and the expertise
of our invaluable employees to provide our customers with the best shopping experience on
the internet,” respectively, showed just how much the organisation was customer oriented and
informed in its strategic marketing decisions. According to Clifford and Schults (1997: 186)

2|Page
on modern marketing, “Modern thought put the subject (human being) at the centre and
elaborated the project of modernity in terms of the relationships this subject develops with the
objects he or she acts on in order to improve conditions of life.”

Strategy, which is the third stage of SOSTAC and last one to be analysed in this essay, was
the most important one as it was a way to establish relation between Amazon’s business
strategy and its strategic marketing decisions. Strategy defines how an organisation plans to
achieve its set objectives. It is the stage that indicates the elements that Amazon makes use
of, such as a number of actions like segmentation, targeting, and positioning, in order to
achieve the business objectives. It was through this discovery that I learnt much about how
modern organisations make use of the target marketing approach, in business, which is based
on a clearly defined market segment and other strategic marketing constructs such as digital
marketing, segment acquisition and crowd sourcing.

What I take away most from this module are the facts that in order for a business to be
successful there is need to incorporate good the right strategic marketing tools. A business
may be defined as an organizational entity involved in the provision of goods and services to
customers, (O'Sullivan and Sheffrin 2003). The two main players being the organisation and
the customer. A relationship must be developed between the two starting with a first point of
contact. First impressions do matter and strategic marketing ensures that the first impression a
business makes in developing a relationship with its customer is relevant and specific. The
most important thing I learnt, therefore, was that strategic marketing is based on a two way
communication which requires listening actively to customers’ needs and wants and
responding to these expectations so it is important that one gets to know and establish a
relationship with the customers as mentioned above. It is through incorporating constructs
like crowd sourcing in order to gather information that comes from the public and then use it
to complete a business-related task that an organisation is able to both satisfy the customer
and achieve its goals of brand awareness. This is a strategy that I discovered, Amazon,
greatly makes use of through its Online Customer Reviews and ratings.

3|Page
While studying this module, I expected to learn how to develop a successful strategic
marketing plan for my family food business and how as an aspiring manager my thought
process would be of useful to my organisation. The main skills and knowledge that I obtained
during this module can be summarised as forming a customer oriented mind-set, global mind-
set, better communication skills, creative thinking and writing, analytical skills, a
comprehensive knowledge about digital marketing, and marketing research skills in
international scope. In terms of digital marketing, I learnt that the internet has transformed the
way businesses are done and therefore affecting the marketing aspect of businesses. Gone are
the days where marketing was only done through just advertisements in broadcast and print
media and also word of mouth and in has the popularity of social media internet marketing
methods like Facebook, Twitter, viral marketing, blogging, marketing through YouTube and
others taken centre stage. In turn I plan on maximising on such modern tools of establishing
relationships with customers.

In conclusion, strategic marketing also proved to be a very cost effective business tool. There
is an old adage that says ‘any marketing is good marketing’ but that can be argued not to be
true because the wrong kind of marketing could fail to derive the anticipated results. In the
case of Amazon, word of mouth marketing would not achieve the same results as online
newspaper marketing. Similarly, where close range/proximity marketing makes use of cutting
edge technology to deliver an organisations message, given the nature of Amazon’s business
which is not geographically locked, such a marketing strategy would not be the best strategy
to follow. Following such a business strategy would cost more than its worth for an online
business. Marketing is, therefore, essential to any business, however failure to employ the
correct marketing strategy could lead to the demise of the business. This clearly shows how
the difference between good strategic marketing practice and practice that falls short of
professional quality can yield, notably, different results for a company.

4|Page
References

Bhasin, H. (2017). SWOT analysis of Amazon – Amazon SWOT analysis. Accessed on 28

June 2017 from: http://www.marketing91.com/swot-analysis-of-amazon/

Clifford, A.F.F. and Shultz, J. II. (1997). From Segmentation to Fragmentation. European
Journal of Marketing, Vol. 31 Issue 3/4 pp. 183 – 207. Permanent link to this document:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000004321

O'Sullivan, A. and Sheffrin, S. M. (2003). Economics: Principles in Action. Upper Saddle

River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall. p. 29. ISBN 0-13-063085-3.

Toman, C. (2011). What is Strategic Marketing? 28 September, 2011. Accessed on 2 August

2017 from: http://blog.daviesbdm.com/what-is-strategic-marketing

5|Page