Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategy is the combination of vision and goals that leads an organization to capture and retain customers. A marketing strategy, like any strategy, is conceptual by nature but is a necessary element of effective business operation. (We'll talk in a minute about the marketing plan, which is the tactical road map for executing the strategy.)

In recent years, marketing strategy has shifted away from a product focus and toward a market focus. This means that marketing strategy is taking an outside-in perspective, focusing on meeting (and exceeding) customer needs instead of creating and selling a discrete offering. This shift puts the focus on what businesses can do for customers, not what customers buy from them—and it has fundamentally changed marketing strategy.

Marketing managers need a comprehensive understanding of the market, the product, competitors, and other factors to create a marketing plan that will get buy-in within the organization and be funded well enough to have an impact. Marketing plans must clearly spell out the target market, market conditions, competitors, and the differentiation that the company seeks for its product or service.

Marketing Plans

The tangible, tactical element of marketing strategy is the marketing plan. Here’s the ugly truth: The marketing plan is the culmination of lots and lots of hard work—many (too many!) meetings, heaps of market research and competitive intelligence, hours of brainstorming and whiteboarding, bucketloads of revisions (and maybe even a few do-overs), probably some tears and pulling of hair, and a sigh of relief when it’s done. Whew!

Marketing plans include both

• strategic elements, or the conceptual and visionary components of the marketing road map (i.e., the guiding reasons for why and what), and 
• tactical elements, or the marketing tactics that will be employed to achieve the strategy itself (i.e., the how-to).

Good marketing plans explicitly connect the elements of strategy with tactical execution (the why with the how). They include operational elements like timelines and budgets, as well as supporting background research (such as SWOT analyses). Progress also needs to be measured through metrics. Identifying and tracking key metrics determines the success or failure of the marketing effort. Analyzing these performance and marketing metrics can also help with adapting future marketing efforts. 

Marketing plans typically cover such areas as

• branding,
• pricing, 
• promotion strategy,
• distribution channels, and
• communications strategy.

We’re going to cover all the main elements of the marketing plan throughout this course so that, by the end of the semester, you know a bit about each.

Under the umbrella of the overall marketing strategy fall individual strategies for each major component, including brand strategy, product strategy, distribution and retail strategy, and marketing communications strategy. All of these areas are woven together to create a cohesive overall strategy that will lead the business forward in a unified direction. Organizations that lack a cohesive marketing strategy often suffer from poor performance.

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