The Strategic Plan

A strategy gives business a defined route to follow and a clear destination. Build a marketing strategy and you will ensure that marketing is a long-term way of working, not a one-off activity.

A marketing strategy provides organization with shared vision of the future. All too often, an organization will perform a marketing task, such a direct mail shot, then sit back and see what happens. A strategic approach will ensure that you maximize returns on your marketing spending and boost the profits of your organization.

A Strategic marketing manager – has a clear picture of the future, anticipates changes in the market and works towards clear long/term goals

A Non-strategic marketing manager – lives day to day without planning, reacts to changes in the market and has only short- term objectives

During the creating of the marketing strategy the marketing manager should proceed as follows –

• Create Your Team – The first steps during preparation of the marketing strategy are the hardest part. It is important to bring together a strong team to help to prepare the marketing plan. The strategic elements must be understood by every member of team in order to assure the marketing success. It is important to involve the people whose function touches on marketing, and those whose job involves considerable customer contact. Before embarking on your marketing strategy, establish common ground by agreeing definitions and purpose. Build the team unity; perhaps by organizing an away day at a pleasant venue to discuss shared marketing issues and concerns. Show that you recognize the contribution each team member can offer.
• Review Current Situation – perform a SWOT analysis SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) Analysis of these four factors provides information on how to shape your marketing strategy. Devise objectives aimed at strengthening weak areas, exploiting strengths, seizing opportunities, and anticipating threats. Identify your 4 strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats answering the questions below

• Do you suit your strengths to full advantage? Could you do more to capitalize on them?
• Are there current or future opportunities you could exploit?
• Are new markets emerging or are there existing, untapped customer groups?
• What threats do your competitors pose? What threats exist in wider marketplace?
• What lets you down? What are you not good at? What do your competitors do better?
• Setting Objectives – Draw up your objectives carefully, because your entire marketing strategy will be structured around them, and ensure that they are measurable so that you can evaluate their success. Short-term objective can be staging posts on the way towards fulfilling long-term goals. Analyze your situation and then ask – “What if we do nothing?” Will products become out of date? Will your competitors grow more powerful? Spend time asking “what if?” to help you realize the effects of not keeping up with customer needs and competitor activities. It can serve to spur action. If you have devised a set of objectives around which to build your marketing strategy, seek agreement for them across the organization. Marketing is a discipline that cuts through many departmental boundaries. Marketing activity will have a knock- on effect in various parts of the operation so, for it to be effective, you will need the support of colleagues. Ensure they understand the need for these objectives and the impact they may have on their work.
• Plan Action – Investigate constraints, such as time and money, and then create a timetable of activity to give you a working marketing plan. The activities on your marketing timetable should be manageable and workable. The costs of not undertaking certain marketing activities, both in missed opportunities and the effect on your reputation, should be taken into consideration.

Look at your marketing ideas and work out the costs of each. Remember that marketing involves meeting customer need at a profit. To be justified, marketing activity should have a positive impact on the balance sheet. Examine not only the costs but also the benefit. An advertising company may cost a lot of money, but if it reaps profit amounting to several times its costs, is it cheap.

• Implementing Strategy – some organizations invest considerable effort in developing a strategy but enthusiasm and energy wane when it comes to implementation. Ensure that your marketing strategy is put into the action, not let to gather dust on a shelf. Assign each task or activity due for implementation within the next 12 months to a named person.
• Review Strategy – The world is not static. Things within your organization or within your market are likely to change over the time. If they do, you might need to redefine your objectives. Review your objectives six-monthly or annually to check that you are still on track.

Answering the following questions will help you evaluate the success of your marketing strategy

• Have profits increased since the strategy was implemented?
• Have we seen an increase in our customer base?
• Have we attracted a greater number of orders, or larger individual orders?
• Has the number of product/service enquiries risen?
• Has awareness of our organization and its products or services increased?

The Strategic Marketing Plan – ACTIVITY

One of the main objectives of strategic brand management is to help you understand how to create niche for your product in the market among existing competitors. By now you should have a fairly good notion of the main ingredients of a strategic marketing plan. Now it’s time to pull it all together and culminate The Marketing Game with a professional-style strategic marketing plan.

Perhaps a good way of approaching this is to imagine that your marketing team is being replaced (you’ve done such a good job that you and your marketing team have executed your stock options and plan to immediately retire to pasture in Vermont) and that one of your last functions is to present a written formal strategic marketing plan to the new, incoming marketing team. So sit back and take a good look at your progression through the past decision periods and come up with a brilliant strategic marketing plan that will cover the next decision period for the incoming marketing team.

Be concise – You have 10 double-spaced pages maximum of text, plus any number of graphs and exhibits that are necessary. I will not determine your grade by weighing your reports, so don’t just add dozens of exhibits for the sake of adding stuff to your report. I expect that most reports will be about eight to ten pages. I don’t think you need more than ten pages to do this report, but I think it will be difficult to do it in, say, five pages or less.

Be precise. {Quantifications for Clarification} Be specific when making claims and statements. For example, “we sold more in period 6 than in period 7” is too vague. How much more? One unit? 500 units? 60% more? Give some real numbers to clarify your statements. Or, “our brand awareness was high” is another example of a phrase that needs some quantification for clarification. How high? Even the highest brand awareness in the industry might be “low.” Or, “our sales increased by 2% from period 2 to period 7” is too vague because it doesn’t specify what kind of sales, e.g., gross sales? Retail sales in rupees? Retail sales in units? It is critically important to be precise.

Be coherent – Don’t just piece together a bunch of paragraphs different people wrote without making them a coherent whole. If I can’t understand what you wrote, I can only assume that you didn’t understand it either when you wrote it. This is a very important part of packaging your “product.” You and I may have some brilliant thoughts and ideas, but if they are not presented coherently, who will ever know how brilliant our ideas are? When a graph is placed in a section of the paper, be sure to discuss it. Graphs and exhibits that are not discussed in the text of the paper will be absolutely ignored or considered an annoyance.

Be logical – Your conclusions, summaries, recommendations and so forth should all follow logically from your data and arguments. And, don’t make up stuff that didn’t happen, e.g., don’t say you’ve been targeting the student segment if the historical data shows you weren’t. What you did and didn’t do has already happened. You can’t change history, but you can use it to build on the future of your firm.

Be creative – Since you have wide creative latitude in your exhibits, graphs and tables, you should be able to dazzle us with your brilliance. You have lots of data to make tables and graphs that help you tell your story. Please label (number and title) the exhibits very carefully and precisely. Don’t just stick exhibits and graphs in the paper for the heck of it. If you put an exhibit in the paper, you must use it and refer to it in the text of your paper. That’s part of being concise. So, be creative, but not at the expense of being concise. Most of you are already very good at using Word, Excel, and Power point.

Be proud of this report – Your name is on this paper, so make sure it reflects positively on you. This is a report you may want to keep in your portfolio for those job interviewers who ask you have ever written a business plan.