Marketing Strategy as the Key to Business Success 
Marketing strategy helps a company to meet it's objectives by finding 
an ideal medium between the company's available resources and 
opportunities that present themselves in the market. 
A strategy would involve the creation of plans that would enable a 
company to achieve its overall objectives. The idea of a strategy 
portrays an image of a well thought out plan as it has had careful 
evaluation of the market and the company to come up with a suitable 
strategy to meet the goals and targets for the company's medium to 
long term future. 
The purpose of a strategy is to allow management to be aware of what 
direction the company is heading in and for them to convey this to the 
workforce so that the whole company is pulling in the same direction 
so the objectives of the company can be met relatively easily compared 
to if there was no sense of cohesion between one department and the 
next. 
A perfect strategy will take into account company objectives, customer 
requirements, the activities of competitors and a well looked into 
prediction of future market patterns that will affect the company. 
Another integral part of a marketing strategy is that it must be 
realistic. There is no point coming up with exaggerated plans that are 
impossible to meet within the company's current limitations. 
To assist with the development of a successful marketing strategy many 
companies will turn to SWOT analysis. This involves a company 
performing an internal audit to ascertain what are the strengths (S) 
and the weaknesses (W) of the current system that company is using. 
Once the company knows how it can improve within itself then the next 
move is to perform an external review which will look at external 
factors that may present the company with opportunities (O) or threats 
(T) in the future, examples of these would be political, economical, 
technological, legal, environmental and social factors all of which 
can have a profound effect on the performance of a company in any 
given market. 
There are 4 main approaches to marketing that can be defined. These 
are all shown in the Ansoff [IMAGE][IMAGE][IMAGE] 
Market penetration 
Product development 
Market development 
Market penetration 
matrix below. 
[IMAGE] 
The first segment, 'Market penetration' involves consolidating your 
existing product in the existing market. This has a very low risk 
level. The next segment, 'Product development' involves bringing out a 
new range of products to appeal to your existing market. 'Market 
development' means making your existing products appeal to a new 
market and finally 'Diversification' is the riskiest of all marketing 
strategies as there are no securities because it involves creating a 
brand new product to take to a new market. 
Marketing strategies must be continually reviewed and altered as needs 
be to ensure that the company's strategy stays responsive to shifts in 
the market. 
The idea that marketing strategy is the key to business success is 
interesting because it is an idea that has both negatives and 
positives. The marketing strategy of a firm will greatly affect the 
way in which a firm functions e.g. without goals for the company how 
do you judge if you are performing well or if you are underperforming? 
However it is not always necessary for all decisions to be thought out 
to the detail which is expected in a marketing strategy. This is 
because a marketing strategy is a time consuming process and for that 
reason will never be able to stay up-to-date for any long period of 
time so it would be necessary for someone in the firm to guide the 
company on his or her own knowledge of the market instead of some 
goals that were outlined in the past where market pressures may have 
been different. 
In conclusion I believe that a marketing strategy is a useful tool to 
have because it helps you to see where you have been and where you're 
going. However it is not something that should be strictly adhered to 
as the market is a changing thing and for this reason so should the 
strategy of the company. So in reference to the statement "Marketing 
strategy is the key to business success" I would have to say that it 
isn't the key but just another important factor that a company must 
have in place if they want their company to be successful.