Strategy and planning
Marketing
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Strategy
•Is a process that can allow an organization
to concentrate its resources on the optimal
opportunities/challenges with the goals of
increasing sales and achieving a
sustainable competitive advantage.
3
Building competitive advantage
• IKEA designs its own furniture, builds its own stores, and
manages the entire supply chain, which allows it to have
lower costs and a superior customer experience.
• Their system is chain-linked together such that it’s hard for
competitors to replicate it without replicating the entire
system.
• IKEA is focusing its resources on challenges to achieve
sustainable competitive advantage.
Who will win?
What is strategy?
• Strategy asnwers three key questions
• Where are we now?
• Where do we want to go?
• How are we going to get there?
• Is strategy connected with action?
• „I‘m gonna wait for the next big thing“
Steve Jobs
• Rumelt in his book Good Bad Strategy:
• Strategy consist of three key areas
•Diagnosis
• That defines or explains nature of the challenge.
• Good diagnosis simplify overwhelming complexity of reality by
identifying certain aspects as critical.
•Guiding policy
• Overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the
obstacles identified in the diagnosis.
•Coherent actions
• Designed to carry out the guiding policy.
• Steps coordinated with one another to work together in
accomplishing the guiding policy.
Kernel of Strategy
•Diagnosis
•A diagnosis defines the challenge.
•What’s holding you back from reaching your goals?
•A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming
complexity of reality down to a simpler story by
identifying certain aspects of the situation as
critical.
•A good diagnosis often uses a metaphor, analogy, or
an existing accepted framework to make it simple
and understandable, which then suggests a domain
of action.
Kernel of Strategy
•Guiding policy
•A guiding policy is an overall approach chosen to
cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in
the diagnosis.
•Like the guardrails on a highway, the guiding policy
directs and constrains action in certain directions
without defining exactly what shall be done.
Kernel of Strategy
•Coherent actions
•A set of coherent actions dictate how the guiding
policy will be carried out.
•The actions should be coherent, meaning the use of
resources, policies, and maneuvers that are
undertaken should be coordinated and support
each other (not fight each other, or be independent
from one another).
Bad and good strategy
• Bad strategy is just a list of “priorities” that don’t support each other,
at best, or actively conflict with each other, undermine each other,
and fight for resources, at worst.
• Bad strategy is the result of a leader who’s unwilling or unable to say
“No.”
• Good strategy is about focusing and coordinating efforts to achieve an
outcome, which necessarily means saying “No” to some goals,
initiatives, and people.
• Good strategy leverages sources of power to overcome an obstacle. It
brings relative strength to bear against relative weakness.
Bad strategy hallmarks
• Fluff: A strategy written in gibberish masking as strategic concepts is
classic bad strategy. It uses abstruse and inflated words to create the
illusion of high-level thinking.
• Failure to face the challenge: A strategy that does not define the
challenge to overcome makes it impossible to evaluate, and impossible
to improve.
• Mistaking goals for strategy: Many bad strategies are just statements of
desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles.
• Bad strategic objectives: A strategic objective is a means to overcoming
an obstacle. Strategic objectives are “bad” when they fail to address
critical issues or when they are impracticable.
Marketing strategy
•Marketing strategy includes all basic and longterm
activities in the field of marketing that deal
with the analysis of the strategic initial situation
of a company and the formulation, evaluation
and selection of market-oriented strategies and
therefore contribute to the goals of the company
and its marketing objectives.
Role of strategy in todays fast
changing, dynamic and
unpredictible world?
14
Steps of Strategic Marketing
Management
• Company Vision
• Company Mission
• Strategic Objectives
• Situation Analysis
• SWOT Analysis
• Marketing Objectives
• Marketing Strategy
• Controlling
What we want to achieve in
the Future.
What do we have Now?
Continuous processes to get
to the desired future.
Did we get there?
15
Company Vision
•Companies that enjoy enduring success have core
values and a core purpose that remain fixed while
their business strategies and practices endlessly
adapt to a changing world.
•Vision provides guidance about what core to
preserve and what future to stimulate progress
toward.
•A well-conceived vision consists of two major
components: core ideology and envisioned future.
16
Company Mission
•A mission statement is a statement of the purpose
of a company, organization or person, its reason for
existance.
•The mission statement should guide the actions of
the organization, spell out its overall goal, provide a
path, and guide decision-making.
•It provides "the framework or context within which
the company's strategies are formulated."
• A: We produce mobile phones.
• B: We enabe people to communicate.
• C: We want to earn 54% of the global
mobile market in 2018.
Mission
• Business mission has to be market
oriented, not product oriented!
• Products come and go but human needs
will last forever.
• Marketing approach: Process of satysfying
consumer needs not the production
process of goods and services.
• This approach ensures adaptability to
market changes.
Examples
• Apple is committed to bringing the best personal computing
experience to students, educators, creative professionals
and consumers around the world through its innovative
hardware, software and Internet offerings.
• Dell’s mission is to be the most successful computer
company in the world at delivering the best customer
experience in markets we serve.
• Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and
make the world more open and connected.
Examples
• Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and
make it universally accessible and useful.
• Microsoft’s mission is to enable people and businesses
throughout the world to realize their full potential.
• Skype’s mission is to be the fabric of real-time
communication on the web.
21
Strategic Objectives
•Strategic objectives are long-term, continuous
strategic areas that help you connect your
mission to your vision.
•Holistic objectives encompass four areas:
financial, customer, operational, and people.
•What are the key activities that you need to
perform in order to achieve your vision?
22
Careful with growth obsession
•Growing the size of the business is not a strategy – it
is the result of increased demand for your products
and services!
•It is the reward for successful innovation,
cleverness, efficiency, and creativity.
•In business, there is blind faith that growth is good,
but that is not the case.
•Growth itself does not automatically create value.
23
Careful with growth obsession
•Tech companies grow in an artificial way, i.e.
spending the money of their investors, not money
they’re making from customers.
•This growth isn’t sustainable, and when they can’t
turn a profit they shut down (or get acquired).
•What could have been a great company, at a smaller
size or slower growth rate, now no longer exists.
24
Strategy
• Strategy establishes a way to match your organization’s
strengths with market opportunities so that your
organization comes to mind when your customer has a
need.
• This section explains how you travel to your final
destination.
• Does your strategy match your strengths in a way that
provides value to your customers?
• Does it build an organizational reputation and recognizable
industry position?
MARKETING ENVIRONMENT
•The marketing environment is defined as
the external and internal forces that
influence an organization´s capability to
undertake its business.
26
Dynamic changes
• Dynamics are waves of change that roll through an industry.
• They are the net result of a myriad of shifts and advances in
technology, cost, competition, politics, and buyer
perceptions.
• Such waves of change are largely exogenous – that is,
beyond the control of any one organization.
• If you can see them coming, they are like an earthquake
that creates new high ground and levels what had
previously been high ground, leaving behind new sources of
advantage for you to exploit.
Marketing audit or diagnosis
•External analysis
• Macro-environment (PESTLE)
• Micro-environment (3C, 5 competitive forces)
•Internal analysis
Strategy requires you to analyze the situation to understand the problem to
be solved, as well as anticipating the actions/reactions of customers and
competitors, which requires considering both positive and negative
outcomes. Ignoring negative outcomes does not set you up for success or
prepare you for the unthinkable to happen. It crowds out critical thinking.
Environment onion
Internal environment
Micro level
Macro level
Sharp, B. (2013). Marketing: Theory, Evidence, Practice (Pap/Psc edition). Oxford University Press.
29
Strenghts and weaknesses
•Knowing your relative strengths and weaknesses,
as well as the relative strengths and weaknesses of
your competitors, can help you find an advantage.
•Strengths and weaknesses are “relative” because a
strength you have in one context, or against one
competitor, may be a weakness in another
context, or against a different competitor.
SWOT analysis design
Positive Negative
InternalExternal
Strenghts Weaknesses
Opportunities Threats
Common mistakes SWOT
• It does not reflect situational analysis results
• Confused strenghts and opportunities as well as weaknesses and
threats
• Unballanced number of specific SWOT elements
• Matrix is not evaluated, in that case it is only overview not strategic
tool
• Highly subjective or indefinite
• There is no connection to marketing objectives in next step of the
strategic process
Strategic goals
•Broader perspective than marketing goals
•Ansoff growth matrix can be utilised as one of very
effective way of setting up the general direction of the
business
•There are two fundamental questions:
• Which customers?
• What products?
Ansoff matrix development
Existing NewExistingNew
Market penetration Product development
Market development Diversification
Product
Market
Goals
S.M.A.R.T.
SMART Goals example
•Our goal is to improve our branding
•No specific – what is branding, what is to improve.
•No measurable – how we can assess it has been
done?
•No achievable or realistic – you cannot assess if the
goal is achievable since there is no change
specified.
•No timely – there is no time frame in which the goal
should be met.
SMART Goals example
•Our goal is to improve our branding
•By the end of 2021, brand XY will have brand
awareness measured by brand recognition
among all customers in Czech Republic on the
level of 45 % from the current 35 %.
Tactics 4C / 4P
• Tactical decision making in range of months or quarters is
dominantly done through marketing mix:
• What solution do we provide to customer?
• (CUSTOMER / product)
• What cost does the customer have?
• (COSTS / price)
• How convenient is our delivery and service?
• (CONVENIENCE / place)
• How do we communicate the value to the customer?
• (COMMUNICATION / promotion)
Control
• Strategic control
• Year
• Month
• Week
• Day
• Definition of metrics to be
measured and controled in
order to achieve strategic goals
while fulfilling business mission
• Evaluation and ongoing
adjustments
Thank you