Marketing Strategy Edge

Marketing Strategy - What Is Strategy

2009-08-17T20:38:00.001-04:00

People talk all the time about "marketing strategy" as if we all know what they mean, but strategy is so important and potentially so powerful, it is crucial to understand what it means and use it to best advantage.

“Strategy” comes from the Greek word strategos meaning general. Strategy is defined by Webster's as “1 The science of planning and conducting military campaigns on a broad scale.” More recently strategy has come to mean “skill in management” or “an ingenious plan or method.”

There are two aspects or connotations to this idea of strategy. The first is, it’s big picture. It involves consideration of all your available resources – people, money, time, physical resources etc. “on a broad scale.” The second is, strategy involves winning some form of competition. Your opponent may be an enemy who is trying to defeat you, or a business competitor who is trying to get your customers to buy from them instead of from you, or an opposing athletic team in a sports event. In all these situations as well as your own real world, there is one key to all effective strategy. This is one of the most important things for you to learn about marketing:

The key to all effective strategy is
concentrating your resources on your greatest opportunities,
where your competition is weak.

So then, effective marketing strategy could be summed up this way:

“Concentrating the organization’s resources on its greatest opportunities to better meet customer needs, outperform competitors, increase income, and achieve enduring success.”

But how do we determine what those greatest opportunities are? Often an organization has a sense of what it is really good at, what it does best. But that may not be right in the eyes of customers. So objective market research can interview customers and ask them, "What do you think is this company's greatest strength - what do they do best?"

The answers may surprise you. In the final analysis it doesn't matter what you in the company think is your greatest opportunity - what matters is what customers think. The opportunity is not on a playing field or any physical place - it is in the minds of customers and prospects. Your greatest opportunity is to meet a need which customers have better than anyone else can.

This gets back to another article's discussion about the marketing orientation. A marketing oriented company looks at the marketplace - the perceptions of customers and prospects - and sees what opportunity it has to meet needs better than the competition. The best marketing strategy is market-driven, not internally driven. Cast your assumptions aside, rub your eyes and look clearly at what customers think, need and want. When you do, you will see your greatest opportunity more clearly than ever before.

This is why the "big guys" all use real market research before making key decisions about what products to promote and what strategy to focus on. You can do the same for your business - and profit as a result.

To learn more about marketing strategy options for your visit, visit Charlotte marketing firm Lawrimore Inc. or the Marketing Strategy Edge.

Marketing Strategy Reloaded for the 21st Century

2009-08-08T16:51:00.003-04:00

Typical definitions of marketing strategy using industrial-era concepts such as the 4 P's - product, price, place and promotion - are in a number of ways locked in to old ways of viewing the world that are not highly productive in the evolving 21st Century.

Pick up the average textbook on marketing strategy and you sense immediately that it was written by a college professor who has probably not run a business or consulted with hundreds of real-world companies as we have. Marketing strategy textbooks tend to be loaded with jargon that is just great for teachers making tests but not for people operating small to mid-size businesses in the real world.

So this post is going to attempt to look afresh at marketing strategy, what it really is.

We cannot separate marketing strategy from the organization as a whole, any more than we can talk about people in the abstract. Marketing strategy is more often a vague intent or direction rather than a firm plan of action that is meticulously followed. Very few businesses have a written marketing strategy, and we would hazard to guess that those that do have a written strategy don't follow it consistently.

The bottom line of marketing strategy is to increase sales and strengthen relationships with customers. In the real world, day to day and minute to minute, opportunities for sales and customers change constantly. The organization interacts with the market environment in real time. Potential customers are searching for some way to meet their own needs, competitors are vying for the same customers in most cases, and there is just an incredible amount of noise in the various communication channels that can facilitate or hinder marketing.

So how can we understand and develop a marketing strategy that will work most effectively in the 21st Century?

First of all we must think of marketing strategy as a system of effectively adapting to the changing market environment, as opposed to a written plan which changes rarely. Some might argue that such a concept applies more to marketing tactics, but there is a fuzzy line between marketing strategy and marketing tactics.

In the military, strategy is something generals do from afar, like plan the invasion of Normandy, and tactics is something soldiers do up close - "touching" the enemy as the word tactics literally means. So we might say that marketing strategy involves planning what we will do to attract more customers and sales, and tactics is the daily connection with and selling to customers and prospects. And all that was fine in the slow, old 20th Century, when the world was fairly stable.

But in the 21st Century the world changes rapidly. One day your business may be doing fine, and the next day you may lose a big customer or several small ones due to a recession or other shift in the market. One day you may dominate your niche and the next day a major competitor enters your territory or starts taking customers away.

Businesses that keep their eyes on their comfy plan documents and not on the constantly shifting marketplace jungle are going to get beaten and eaten. Business today is more like piloting an airplane through a storm than sitting still behind a desk. Change is the ruling condition of the marketplace. This is one reason social media like Twitter have become rapidly popular. Such media allow you to monitor the changing marketplace in real time.

We'll discuss this fascinating topic of what marketing strategy needs to be in the 21st Century in our next post. Meanwhile your comments are welcome.

Marketing Strategy Edge Launches

2009-08-08T09:41:00.000-04:00

MarketingStrategyEdge.com is a new website and companion blog launched by Charlotte marketing firm Lawrimore Communications Inc.

Marketing Strategy Edge was created to provide a single website focused solely on marketing strategy, including Internet marketing strategy, traditional marketing strategy, social media marketing strategy and other marketing strategy topics.

Marketing Strategy Edge features live newsfeeds from Google,Yahoo and other sources about marketing strategy, internet marketing strategy and other relevant news. So you can visit Marketing Strategy Edge daily to get the latest news from around the world.

Follow us on Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/marketstrat