What is the importance of a marketing strategy?

Answer 1

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory; tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat". Sun Tzu - The Art of War.

Marketing Strategy is something that helps companies achieves Marketing objectives. Marketing objectives help achieve corporate objectives and corporate objectives aim to achieve a competitive advantage over rival organizations.

Firstly, a Managing Director or senior management team, or executive board of directors (who ever is in charge) decides on overall corporate objectives. One corporate objective might be to increase sales by X%.

In order to achieve this objective the board might split it into smaller bite sized objectives, assigned to different departments. Marketing might get the following objective - Identify 2 new customer segments, or increase brand awareness by X%.

Do you see how business objectives filter down through the levels of organisation within a company?

Corporate objectives - corporate strategy - individual department objectives - departmental strategy - departmental tactics - departmental administration.

Marketing strategy is all about how to achieve Marketing objectives, Marketing tactics is how to implement strategies, and administration holds the whole thing together.

Referring back to Sun Tzu, the Art of War is a ancient Chinese text about military strategy, which in more recent years has become a common fixture on the desks of many business managers and it is packed full of military strategies both offensive and defensive. These strategies are as relevant to business today as they were to the Chinese military a 1000 years ago. The first chapter of this book is about laying plans.

Planning and research are important elements to any kind of strategy, infact without this research and planning strategy is worse than useless, it is misleading and dangerous to the organization's ability to remain competitive.

Sun Tzu famously said 'know your enemy as yourself; he who knows himself but not his enemy will win half the time; he who knows his enemy but not himself will win half the time; he who knows neither himself nor his enemy is sure to be defeated.' Common sense perhaps, but it does illustrate the importance of strategy.

The marketing Guru Phillip Kotler, in his book 'Kotler on Marketing' writes that the process of planning is useful even if the plans themselves are not. Simply sitting and talking about strategies is beneficial because of the ideas stimulated.

In marketing, planning means conducting an environmental audit - do a PEST analysis, SWOT analysis, Competitor analysis, and anything else you could think of to help you understand the environment in which the organization operates.

Having done all this you should identify the key points and the most significant opportunities and threats facing the organization. You can use this information to develop a marketing strategy that focuses on the organizations strengths, addresses its weaknesses.

The 3 types of analysis I mention above are all useful individually, but the most sophisticated method is to use them in conjunction with each other. Let them flow into each other, inform each other.

I wish some one had told me that a long time ago. I didn't realize that (above) until the 3rd year of my degree.

One academic who has written a lot about marketing strategy is Michael Porter who came up with a rather good model called 'Generic Strategies', here's a very good explanation: http://www.quickmba.com/strategy/generic.shtml. However, if you are not familiar with these concepts then it might be in more detail than you really need, or care about.

I will summarize the model.

There are 3 generic strategies that might achieve competitive advantage, these are Cost leadership, be the cheapest; Differentiation, have a better product; Focus, set your sights on a small niche in the market which you can satisfy very well.

The reason I brought this model into it is because it is important to actually choose and achieve one of these strategies, some academics (Johnson and Scholes) think it is possible to effectively achieve 2 of the generic strategies at once but there is a general consensus that organizations shouldn't get 'stuck in the middle' of all the strategies and so not be able to achieve any effective strategy at all.

A Marketing strategy provides consistency throughout the different elements of an organization's marketing mix. If an organization has decided to use a pricing strategy that indicates a high quality product and the marketing literature doesn't support this then there is a breakdown of strategy, it gives a confusing message and customers would thing 'hey, I paid a tonne for this product but it's a load of rubbish because they can't even put together a decent leaflet" or something like that.

Strategy is the foundations upon which marketing campaigns are formed.

If you ask the average Joe what marketing is the chances are they will say 'advertising and promotion' perhaps branding.

This is a common misconception; marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, satisfying and anticipating customer requirements profitably (that's the Chartered Institute of Marketing's definition). The important words are 'management process' that implies a strategic function. If we take this literally then we might say if it's not strategic (directly or indirectly) it's not marketing; must be some other business function, some useless, ill-informed activity that is a waste of money.

I wouldn't mention that to your boss though.