Assignment of business to

business to marketing

Submitted by:
Sachin Saxena
09BS0001988
Explain the role of Marketing in Strategic Planning?
Marketing strategy is a process that can allow an organization to concentrate its limited
resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable
competitive advantage. A marketing strategy should be centered around the key concept that
customer satisfaction is the main goal.

Marketing plays an important role in the strategic planning process for many organizations.
Although some marketing positions are represented at the corporate level, most are at the
functional level within the business units of an organization.

If the company has obtained an adequate understanding of the customer base and its own
competitive position in the industry, marketing managers are able to make their own key
strategic decisions and develop a marketing strategy designed to maximize the revenues and
profits of the firm. The selected strategy may aim for any of a variety of specific objectives,
including optimizing short-term unit margins, revenue growth, market share, long-term
profitability, or other goals.

Strategic marketing activities can be classified into three basic functions. First, marketers help
orient everyone in the organization toward markets and customers. Thus, they are responsible for
helping organizations execute a marketing philosophy throughout the strategic planning process.
Second, marketers help gather and analyze information required to examine the current situation,
identify trends in the marketing environment, and assess the potential impact of these trends.
This information and analysis provides input for corporate, business, and marketing strategic
plans. Third, marketers are involved in the development of corporate, business, and marketing
strategic plans. Marketing’s influence varies across organizations. For organizations driven by a
marketing philosophy, marketing necessarily plays a key role in strategic decision making. The
trend toward pushing strategic planning responsibility further down the organization is
increasing marketing’s clout in an organization’s strategic planning process

Marketing management relates to specific product marketing strategies. It differs from strategic
marketing in its basic orientation. Strategic marketing focuses on broad strategic decisions at the
corporate and business levels. Marketing management is concerned, by contrast, with specific
trategic decisions for individual products and the day-to-day activities needed to execute these
strategies successfully. At the operating level, marketing managers must focus on the four Ps of
the marketing mix: price, product, promotion, and place (distribution). The strategic role of
marketing and marketing management is now in a period of considerable change and evolution.
These changes are due to a number of important environmental phenomena that are affecting the
way many firms do business. To begin, many well-known companies work closely with edicated
partners on the supply side (often using single supply partners) and the distributor side of their
business, expecting their distributors to play proactive roles in the development of services and
marketing strategy.
For example, on the supply side, the modern-day Nike does very little manufacturing of its own
and focuses largely on marketing. In this vein, companies such as this are actually embedded in
business networks, comprising strategic alliances among suppliers, distributors, and the
marketing firm. Other influences on marketing include the connected-knowledge economy;
globalized and consolidated industries; fragmented markets; and demanding customers and
consumers. With these changes, new kinds of competitors will emerge, markets will continue to
become homogenized across country boundaries, and mass markets will erode in the face of
mass customization. Business customers and individual
consumers expect diversity and have multiple means of obtaining products, as well as learning
about company offerings. Some observers foresee a future in which the Web will enable
automated purchasing, anonymous transactions, and the bypassing of most intermediaries.
The role of marketing within the firm is in transition as well. For example, some scholarly
observers have argued that the marketing function will be reduced as the values embodied in the
firm’s market orientation permeate the firm. That is, a crossfunctional dispersion of marketing
activities will occur as the firm becomes marketoriented throughout. In a test of this premise, one
study of managers across functions (i.e., marketing, human relations, operations, accounting, and
finance) within their firms revealed that marketing as a separate function still contributes to a
firm’s financial performance, customer-relationship performance, and new-product performance
beyond the performance attributable to the firm’s general market orientation. Therefore, an
understanding of the strategic planning process is even more important in today’s ever-changing
marketplace.

Marketing Plans - How to prepare them: How to use them, describes The Ten Steps of the
Strategic Marketing Planning
Process as follows:

The Ten Steps of the Strategic Marketing Planning Process

CONTENTS OF THE STRATEGIC MARKETING PLAN:

1. Mission Statement
This clearly sets out the reason for the existence of the Strategic Business Unit (SBU) and should
Briefly state:
• Role or contribution of the unit
• Definition of the business
• Distinctive competence
• Indications for future direction

2. Summary of Performance
The current and historical information can be easy represented in graphical form.
Aggregated Financial Summary
 3. Financial Summary of Strategic Plan

Its purpose is to summarize the financial implications over the planning period. For example:

‘This three-year business plan shows an increase in revenue

From £85m to £302m and an increase in contribution from £37mto £163m.’

4. Market Overview

The Market Overview considers the following:

• Market structure
• Market trends
• Key Market Segments
• Gap Analysis
• Competitive Forces (Porter).

The Gap Analysis charts illustrate the trend situation and build up the results of the marketing
Objectives and strategies.
This chart illustrates how the shortfall will be closed or not, as the case may be. In the example
Below there is still a gap between the overall objective and what can be realistically achieved.
 5. SWOT Analysis
The SWOT Analysis makes use of the Critical Success Factor (CSF) technique. This section
takes into account how the following changes will affect business in the planning period:

• Technology
• International trade
• General Economy
• Socio-political factors
• Demographics
• Market Factors
• Competition.

6. Portfolio Summary

This section evaluates the findings from the Boston Matrix and the Directional Policy Matrix
calculated from the SWOT Analysis.

7. Overall Assumptions

The assumptions need to be:

• Explicit
• Few in number
• Agreed by key managers
• Related to issues in the SWOT Analysis

8. Strategies
Product, price, place and promotion define the marketing strategies. Typically they include
Actionable propositions such as:

Product

• Change product design, performance,

quality, features, positioning
• Consolidate product lines
• Acquire and develop new products
• Withdraw product lines

Place

• Change channels
• Change delivery or distribution
• Change service levels
• Consolidate distribution
A new P has been added making it a total of 5P's- Politics which affects marketing in a
significant way.

Implementation planning
After the firm's strategic objectives have been identified, the target market selected, and the
desired positioning for the company, product or brand has been determined, marketing
managers’ focus on how to best implement the chosen strategy - implementation planning across
the "4Ps" of marketing:.

Taken together, the company's implementation choices across the 4(5)Ps are often described as
the marketing mix, meaning the mix of elements the business will employ to "go to market" and
execute the marketing strategy. The overall goal for the marketing mix is to consistently
deliver a compelling value proposition that reinforces the firm's chosen positioning, builds
customer loyalty and brand equity among target customers, and achieves the firm's
marketing and financial objectives.

Evaluation: Reporting, measurement, feedback and control systems

Marketing management employs a variety of metrics to measure progress against objectives. It is

the responsibility of marketing managers – in the marketing department or elsewhere – to ensure
that the execution of marketing programs achieves the desired objectives and does so in a cost-
efficient manner.

Marketing management therefore often makes use of various organizational control systems,
such as sales forecasts, sales force and reseller incentive programs, sales force management
systems, and customer relationship management tools (CRM). Recently, some software vendors
have begun using the term "marketing operations management" or "marketing resource
management" to describe systems that facilitate an integrated approach for controlling marketing
resources. In some cases, these efforts may be linked to various supply chain management
systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), material requirements planning (MRP),
efficient consumer response (ECR), and inventory management systems.

Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of and marketing effectiveness various marketing
initiatives is a significant problem for marketing management. Various market research,
accounting and financial tools are used to help estimate the ROI of marketing investments. Brand
valuation, for example, attempts to identify the percentage of a company's market value that is
generated by the company's brands, and thereby estimate the financial value of specific
investments in brand equity. Another technique, integrated marketing communications (IMC), is
a CRM database-driven approach that attempts to estimate the value of marketing mix
executions based on the changes in customer behavior these executions generate.[9]