Marketing, Strategy, and Competitive Analysis - …

1 8 Marketing, strategy , andCompetitive AnalysisWe ve all heard someone in the course of business say that marketing is fluff and hype. However, the wisest, mostsavvy, and most successful businesspeople understand thatmarketing is far from that. marketing is everything you do on a dailybasis to sell a product or provide a service to a customer. marketing en-compasses every way in which a customer perceives a business andeverything that generates enough interest from a customer and encour-ages customers to actually pay for the product or service. As PeterVessenes suggests, cash may be king, but marketing is everything.

2 What does it really mean to market your service or product? Of-ten, people immediately equate marketing with advertising and seeonly the amount of money that advertising will cost. However, by defi-nition, marketing is actually the process by which we offer goods orservices up for sale. Forward-thinking marketing strategists suggestthat marketing is not a cost or expense but rather an investment,because much of the benefit of marketing is longer-term and may takeyears to fully provide its has also been referred to as a social and managerialChapter145 TLFeBOOK process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need andwant through creating, offering, and exchanging products of valuewith others.

3 Additionally, it is all too often equated only with themore focused function of selling. But marketing encompasses awider range of activities that must be a fully integrated process and, indeed, will form a foundation and catalyst for making , the key to successful sales is a consistent proactive market-ing S KEY COMPONENTS: CREATING VALUE FOR THE CUSTOMERWhat, then, is the key to a consistent proactive marketing strategy ?First and foremost it is a philosophy that dedicates resources of thefirm to ensuring that the wants, needs, and demands of the customerare the firm s focus.

4 This customer-focused mentality is the foundationof the strategy that makes up the entire marketing , it is a plan, supported by the firm s philosophy. Oncethe philosophy is in place, a plan can give direction, guidance, and astructure for proactive strategies that will increase sales and improvebusiness relationships. Often firms find themselves dedicating re-sources to marketing activities from trade shows to flyers andspending money on marketing that is not targeted to the right audi-ence at the right time. This is reactive marketing with a shotgun,rather than a rifle.

5 Conversely, a proactive, focused marketing plancan provide guidance for targeting the right audience at the rightplace and at the right time, which in turn maximizes the return oninvestment and increases , marketing is a process of creating value for the is a set of activities to educate, communicate with, and motivate thetargeted consumer about the firm s services or the company s productand , this set of activities, the marketing mix, is repre-sented by four parts, the well-known 4 P s of marketing : price, prod-uct, placement, and promotion. But to create a marketing strategy andplan that touch on all areas necessary to position a product in the mar-ket to maximize sales revenues, there are multiple areas to be AND STRATEGY146 TLFeBOOKAn effective marketing strategy /plan is an ongoing value-creatingprocess composed of several elements: marketing segmentation.

6 marketing strategy . Market research. Pricing. Placement. Value SegmentationOne of the first steps in developing an overall marketing strategy is toperform a market segmentation Analysis , as a way to manage the strat-egy development process and ensure its effectiveness and success. Theconcept behind market segmentation is intuitive and relatively segmentation is simply taking a look at the overall market foryour product and service and thinking of it in terms of smaller, moremanageable of market segmentation as what Bert and Ernie fromSesame Streetsing about when they suggest One of these things is notlike the other.

7 One of these things doesn t belong. In a sense, that swhat we are doing when we segment a market we are looking at thewhole and trying to determine how we can group the mass market intosmaller groups that, while different from each other, within the groupsare more we have identified these subgroupings, we can target whichof these market segments are likely to be the most productive and bethe best fit with our company s strengths and Competitive well-used example of market segmentation is the way the play-ers in the hospitality industry look at the market for hotel/motelrooms.

8 Rather than take a one size fits all approach to this market, acompany like Marriott looks at the overall market and segments it intoseveral smaller, but more focused market segments. For the travel andleisure segment of the overall hotel/motel market, Marriott s FairfieldInn is located near major tourist attractions, is budget priced, and ap-peals to families. For the middle-level manager who travels a lot andMarketing, strategy , and Competitive Analysis147 TLFeBOOK wants some comforts of home while on the road, the Courtyard byMarriott is located near businesses and has a residential feels likehome atmosphere.

9 For CEOs and top-level executives, Marriott s Ritz-Carlton has all the upscale amenities and top-level customer servicethat presidents and CEOs of business and industry are used to and ex-pect when they travel. Note in these examples how Marriott has bro-ken this overall mass market into more manageable, more focusedsegments, and, importantly, how its marketing strategy for each seg-ment is tailored to that applying the principles of market segmentation, marketers canmake better use of their marketing budgets and more efficiently man-age their overall marketing StrategyTo build a strong and durable house, it is necessary to create blue-prints.

10 Likewise, to build a strong and profitable business, it is neces-sary to develop a strategy . Essentially, marketing strategy is a plan thatallows a business owner to direct activities that are consistent with thegoals of the business owner and organization and spend money wiselyin order to create the greatest amount of return on Research and Competitive IntelligenceTo thoroughly understand what is happening in the industry in whichyou operate, it is invaluable to know what the trends in the industryare as well as what the firm s competitors are doing to make money, toimprove their businesses.