Marketing Strategy

● Strategic planning: process of creating and maintaining a fit between an organization’s

objectives and resources and evolving market opportunities
○ Goal is long term profit and growth, sales and revenue generation
● Marketing planning: designing activities relating to marketing objectives and changing
environment
● Marketing plan: written document that acts as a guidebook for marketing activities
● Marketing strategy: specifies a target market and related marketing mix
● Targeting market: fairly homogenous group of customers who share common
characteristics that the company wishes to appeal
● Marketing mix: set of controllable variables the company puts together using the 4 P’s in
order to appeal to the target market

Mass Marketing vs Target Marketing

● Production-oriented manager sees everyone as basically similar and practices mass
marketing
● Market-oriented manager sees everyone as different and practices target marketing
○ Ford uses target marketing
● Marketing mix is the set of tools that a firm uses to implement its marketing strategy
○ Product, Price, Place, Promotion

Elements of a Marketing Plan

● Every plan should be unique to the firm for which it was created, but the topics covered
should be the same
● Foundation includes
○ Core values: fundamental, passionate, enduring principles that guide an
organization’s conduct over time
○ Mission statement: state the firm’s business based on a careful analysis of benefits
sought by present and potential customers and an analysis of existing and
anticipated environmental conditions
 ○ Organizations culture: refers to values, ideas, attitudes, and norms of behavior
learned and shared among organization members

Identifying Attractive Opportunities

● Effective marketing strategy planning matches opportunities to the firm’s resources and
objectives
● Breakthrough opportunities: involve development of innovative and hard to copy
marketing strategies, normally very attention-grabbing and successful
○ Example of promotional breakthrough: McDonald’s introducing the Happy Meal
● Competitive advantage: uniques features of a company and its products are perceived by
the market as significant and superior to the competition
○ Copyright, patents, location, branding etc.
● Types of Opportunities to pursue
○ Market penetration: try to increase sales of present products in present markets,
often through more aggressive marketing mix
○ Market development: try to increase sales by selling present products in new
markets
○ Product development: offer new or improved products for present markets
○ Diversification: moving into totally different lines of business, perhaps even
entirely unfamiliar products, markets, or levels in the production-marketing-
distribution system (ex. Disney launching their cruises)
● SWOT Analysis: identifying and listing a firm’s internal Strengths and Weaknesses and
external Opportunities and Threats