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.