Marketing strategy


Marketing strategy refers to the set of coordinated actions undertaken by an organization to increase sales, strengthen market presence, and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. It provides a structured and deliberate approach to promoting products or services by aligning organizational resources, market insights, and long-term objectives through systematic planning and analysis.
The field of strategic marketing emerged during the 1970s and 1980s as a distinct discipline, evolving from strategic management. Its central concern is the relationship between organizations and their markets, with particular emphasis on understanding customer needs and leveraging internal capabilities to create value that competitors cannot easily replicate. In recent years, digital technologies have significantly reshaped marketing strategy by enabling data driven decision making, personalized engagement, and real time performance measurement.

Marketing management versus marketing strategy

Marketing strategy and marketing management represent related but distinct processes. Marketing strategy focuses on defining the overall direction and competitive positioning of the organization. It addresses long term questions such as target markets, value propositions, and resource allocation. Marketing management, by contrast, is concerned with execution.
Marketing strategy helps a company turn its big ideas into realistic goals, while marketing management involves making detailed plans to put those goals into action. Marketing strategy is often called higher-order planning because it sets the overall direction for the company and guides the marketing program.
Marketing Management is the process of planning how a business will introduce its products or services. On the other hand, marketing strategy involves different methods a business owner or marketer uses to attract customers through various ways, like online or offline methods.

Marketing Strategy Examples:
Marketing Management Examples:
  • Launch & Promotion
  • Launch Mode – Offline & Online
  • Campaign Management
  • Budget for the promotional plan
  • Advertisement Strategy

    History

Marketing scholars have suggested that strategic marketing arose in the late 1970s and its origins can be understood in terms of a distinct evolutionary path:

Overview

Marketing strategy involves mapping out the company's direction for the forthcoming planning period, whether that be three, five, or ten years. It involves undertaking a 360° review of the firm and its operating environment to identify new business opportunities that the firm could potentially leverage for competitive advantage. Strategic planning can also reveal market threats that the firm may need to consider for long-term sustainability. Strategic planning makes no assumptions about the firm continuing to offer the same products to the same customers in the future. Instead, it is concerned with identifying the business opportunities that are likely to be successful and evaluating the firm's capacity to leverage such opportunities. It seeks to identify the strategic gap, which is the difference between where a firm is currently situated and where it should be situated for sustainable, long-term growth.
Strategic planning seeks to address three deceptively simple questions, specifically:
  • Where are we now?
  • What business should we be in?
  • How should we get there?
A fourth question may be added to the list, namely 'How do we know when we got there?' Due to the increasing need for accountability, many marketing organizations use a variety of metrics to track strategic performance, allowing for corrective action to be taken as required. On the surface, strategic planning seeks to address three simple questions, however, the research and analysis involved in strategic planning are very sophisticated and require a great deal of skill and judgment.

Tools and techniques

Strategic analysis is designed to address the first strategic question, "Where are we now?" Traditional market research is less useful for strategic marketing because the analyst does not seek insights about customer attitudes and preferences. Instead, strategic analysts are seeking insights into the firm's operating environment to identify possible future scenarios, opportunities, and threats.
Mintzberg suggests that the top planners spend most of their time engaged in analysis and are concerned with industry or competitive analyses as well as internal studies, including the use of computer models to analyze trends in the organization. Strategic planners use a variety of research tools and analytical techniques, depending on the environment complexity and the firm's goals. Fletcher and Bensoussan, for instance, have identified some 200 qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques regularly used by strategic analysts while a recent publication suggests that 72 techniques are essential. No optimal technique can be identified as useful across all situations or problems. Determining which technique to use in any given situation rests with the analyst's skills. The choice of tool depends on a variety of factors including: data availability; the nature of the marketing problem; the objective or purpose, the analyst's skill level as well as other constraints such as time or motivation.
The most commonly used tools and techniques include:
Research methods
Analytical techniques
The vision and mission address the second central question, 'Where are we going?' At the conclusion of the research and analysis stage, the firm will typically review its vision statement, mission statement and, if necessary, devise a new vision and mission for the outlook period. At this stage, the firm will also devise a generic competitive strategy as the basis for maintaining a sustainable competitive advantage for the forthcoming planning period.
A vision statement is a realistic, long-term future scenario for the organization. It is a "clearly articulated statement of the business scope." A strong vision statement typically includes the following:
  • Competitive scope
  • Market scope
  • Geographic scope
  • Vertical scope
Some scholars point out the market visioning is a skill or competency that encapsulates the planners' capacity "to link advanced technologies to market opportunities of the future, and to do so through a shared understanding of a given product market.
A mission statement is a clear and concise statement of the organization's reason for being and its scope of operations, while the generic strategy outlines how the company intends to achieve both its vision and mission.
Mission statements should include detailed information and must be more than a simple motherhood statement. A mission statement typically includes the following:
  • Specification of target customers
  • Identification of principal products or services offered
  • Specification of the geographic scope of operations
  • Identification of core technologies or core capabilities
  • An outline of the firm's commitment to long-term survival, growth and profitability
  • An outline of the key elements in the company's philosophy and core values
  • Identification of the company's desired public image

    Generic competitive strategy

The generic competitive strategy outlines the fundamental basis for obtaining a sustainable competitive advantage within a category. Firms can normally trace their competitive position to one of three factors:
  • Superior skills
  • Superior resources
  • Superior position
It is essential that the internal analysis provide a frank and open evaluation of the firm's superiority in terms of skills, resources or market position since this will provide the basis for competing over the forthcoming planning period. For this reason, some companies engage external consultants, often advertising or marketing agencies, to provide an independent assessment of the firm's capabilities and resources.

Ethnic marketing strategy

There is one strategy that is at times weaved into marketing strategies, however not explicitly stated. And it is unethical in that it specifically targets unsuspecting minority groups. First, consider the definition of ethics, which is the moral question of whether or not something is socially acceptable. Applying this definition to marketing strategy, companies must be wary that they do not purposefully seek to seclude groups of people based on their cultural background. A company that is seeking to expand internationally has a duty to establish their marketing agenda with multiple cultures in mind, so as to prevent bodies of people from getting left out. Marketing strategies have two goals: first of which, keeping with company's goals, is to benefit in some way consumers on a micro level from person to person and then second, keep all of society as a whole in contentment.