Chapter 3: The Role of Marketing in Strategic Planning

Nature of High Performance Business

1. The major challenge facing todays hospitality companies is knowing how to
build and maintain healthy businesses in the face of a rapidly changing
marketplace and environment.
Stakeholders
2. Today businesses increasingly recognize that they must nurture other
stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, and the
communities where their businesses are located.
3. There is always a synergistic loop between satisfied customers and satisfied
employees.
Processes
4. They [Companies] are now building cross-functional teams that manage core
business processes.
5. The result was a radically different approach to hotel accounting called
market segment accounting. This new approach incorporated marketing and
strategic planning into accounting rather than viewing them as separate
stand-alone areas and philosophies.
Resources
6. To carry out processes, a company needs such resources as personnel,
materials, machines, and information.
7. More companies today have decided to outsource less critical sources.
Organization
8. The organizational side of a company consists of its structure, policies, and
culture, all of which tend to become dysfunctional in a rapidly changing
company.
9. Although structure and policies can be changed, the company is the hardest
to change.
Corporate Strategic Planning: Defining Marketings Role
10.At the corporate level, the company starts the strategic planning process by
defining its overall purpose and mission.

11.This is the focus of strategic planning, the process of developing and

maintaining a strategic fit between the organizations goals and capabilities
and its changing marketing opportunities.
12.The hospitality industry faces the need for greater empowerment of
employees, particularly at middle-management levels.
13.The hospitality and tourism industries are international and multicultural.
Attitudes and culture sometimes create sharp differences in management
style and in the perceived importance of strategic planning, empowerment,
and other concepts discussed in this chapter.
Defining the Corporate Mission
14.A mission statement is a statement of the organizations purposewhat it
wants to accomplish in the larger environment.
15.Missions are at their best when they are guided by a vision, an almost
impossible dream.
16.The corporate mission statement should stress major policies that the
company wants to honor.
Setting Company Objectives and Goals
17.Each manager should have objectives and be responsible for reaching them.
Designing the Business Portfolio
18.Companies are in the hotel business or the cruise line business. However,
market definitions of a business are superior to product definitions.
Developing Growth Strategies
19.Marketing must identify, evaluate, and select opportunities and lay down
strategies for capturing them.

20.
Diversification Growth
21.First, the company could seek new products that have technological or
marketing synergies with existing product lines, even though the products
may appeal to a new class of customers (concentric diversification strategy).
22.Diversification opportunities sometimes arise as a result of new technology.
23.Companies that diversify too broadly into unfamiliar products or industries
can lose their market focus.
Integrative Growth
24.Opportunities in diversification, market development, and product
development can be seized through integrating backward, forward, or
horizontally within that businesss industry.
25.A hotel company could select backward integration by acquiring one of its
suppliers, such as a food distributor, or it could acquire tour wholesalers or
travel agents (forward integration).
26.Finally, the hotel company might acquire one or more competitors, provided
that the government does not bar the move (horizontal integration).
27.Integrative growth offers opportunities in related businesses, but a company
must have or acquire the expertise to succeed in the new business.
Marketing Strategy and the Marketing Mix

28.The goal is to create value for customers and build profitable customer
relationships.
29.Guided by marketing strategy, the company designs an integrated marketing
mix made up of factors under its controlproduct, price, place, and
promotion (the four Ps).
Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy
30.They must win customers from competitors and then keep and grow them by
delivering greater value. But before it can satisfy consumers, a company
must first understand their needs and wants.
31.The process of dividing a market into distinct groups of buyers who have
different needs, characteristics, or behavior who might require separate
products or marketing programs is called market segmentation.
32.Market targeting involves evaluating each market segments attractiveness
and selecting one or more segments to enter.
Market Differentiation and Positioning
33.A products position is the place the product occupies, relative to competitors
products, in consumers minds.
34.Thus effective positioning begins with differentiation, actually differentiating
the companys market offering so that it gives consumers more value.
Developing an Integrated Marketing Mix
35.Product means the goods-and-services combination the company offers to
the target market.
36.Price is the amount of money customers must pay to obtain the product.
37.Place includes company activities that make the product available to target
customers.
38.Promotion means activities that communicate the merits of the product and
persuade target customers to buy it.
39.
It holds that the four Ps concept takes the sellers view of the market,
not the buyers view.
Marketing Analysis

40.
41.We define a marketing opportunity as follows: an area of need that a
company can perform profitably.
42.We define an environmental threat as follows: A challenge posed by
unfavorable trends or developments that would lead, in the absence of
defensive marketing action, to sales or profit deterioration.
Goal Formulation
43.The business unit should strive to arrange its objectives from most to least
important.
44.Goals indicate what a business unit wants to achieve; strategy answers how
to get there.