LO 03: Marketing plan for an organisation that

meets marketing objectives

3.2 Market Planning Process

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Marketing Plan
▪ A marketing plan includes the following components:
• Description of your market situation, including your customer profile and descriptions of
changes affecting your customers, competitors, and business climate
• Your marketing goals and objectives
• Your company’s positioning and brand statements

• Your marketing strategies, including plans for your product, distribution, pricing, and
promotions, along with plans for retaining customers, gaining repeat business, and building
loyalty
• Your marketing budget
• Your tactical and action plans
• Your long-range plans

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Objective and goal setting
▪ Like a project timeline, you have to have an end date before you can determine when to
start. This is your chance to think big and picture those profits or media recognition at the
end of your telescope.
▪ What is it that you want to achieve in one, three, five years? How does your marketing
plan fit into the overall business mission statement of the company? Who is your primary
target audience? Is there a profit margin you want to reach?
▪ Many organizations are utilizing the S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic
and time-specific) format to identify their achievable goals. After gathering these S.M.A.R.T.
goals, use and compare these with the greater vision you have for the marketing plan to
shape your final plan.

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Assessing your current situation
▪ Before you set out to gain, you must first identify what you already have. It can be more
useful – and economical – to use or restructure a current environment than to bring in
outside talent.
▪ Gather your team and use the S.W.O.T. (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats)
analysis to assess your team’s current status. This will help you consider whether the
marketing objective is attainable.
▪ If the marketing objective is not attainable with the current team or resources, it is time to
re-evaluate and a different set of objectives should be considered. Conducting market
research, analysis, and segmentation will come useful for you.
▪ This is also the step where you evaluate risks along with opportunities. External factors
such as the political climate, competitors, state of the economy, and technology also
influence marketing opportunities.

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Writing the plan and strategy
▪ Whether it is two or thirty pages, as long as the plan recognizes your
target customers and has steps to take action towards delivering your
product or service to them, it is a solid plan. The famous four P’s
come into play here: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion.
▪ What is right product? Yours, of course, given that it functions and has a good
appearance.
▪ What is the right price? An amount that will entice consumers to buy a larger
quantity, as your bottom line is profit.
▪ Where is the right place? Your product or service must be desired in a certain
marketplace at a certain time.
▪ What’s the most suitable promotion? Your target audience will determine the
most appropriate marketing mix that will bring the most profit.
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A standard Table of Contents for a thorough marketing plan should include:

• Executive Summary
• Marketing Objectives
• Internal SWOT Analysis
• External factors
• Current Marketing Performance
• Marketing Strategies for: Target Markets and Marketing Mix
• Implementation
• Marketing organization and allocation of responsibilities
• Evaluation and Monitoring Protocol

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Implementing and managing the plan
▪ At every step of the marketing planning, marketing managers should use
evaluation periods and feedback to assess if the current strategies are
meeting goals and expectations.
▪ Remember to stay flexible – the opportunities and risks you established in
your S.W.O.T. analysis may not coincide with expected results.
▪ Changes such as consumer demand, channel diversification, competitive
responses, and supply costs changes might affect outcomes and should be
factored into the management of the plan.

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3.2.1 Defining the company mission statement and corporate
objectives.
▪ A company’s mission statement defines its culture, values, ethics,
fundamental goals, and agenda. Furthermore, it defines how each of these
applies to the company's stakeholders its employees, distributors, suppliers,
shareholders, and the community at large—use this statement to align their
goals with that of the company.

▪ The statement reveals what the company does, how it does it, and why it
does it. Prospective investors may also refer to the mission statement to
see if the values of the company align with theirs.

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3.2.2 The marketing audit, applying
analytical tools

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SWOT
Analysis
▪ SWOT stands for
Strengths, Weaknesses,
Opportunities, and
Threats, and so a SWOT
Analysis is a technique for
assessing these four
aspects of your business.

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Strengths
▪ Strengths describe what an organization excels at and what separates it from the competition: a
strong brand, loyal customer base, a strong balance sheet, unique technology, and so on. For
example, a hedge fund may have developed a proprietary trading strategy that returns market-beating
results. It must then decide how to use those results to attract new investors.
Weaknesses
▪ Weaknesses stop an organization from performing at its optimum level. They are areas where the
business needs to improve to remain competitive: a weak brand, higher-than-average turnover, high
levels of debt, an inadequate supply chain, or lack of capital.
Opportunities
▪ Opportunities refer to favorable external factors that could give an organization a competitive
advantage. For example, if a country cuts tariffs, a car manufacturer can export its cars into a new
market, increasing sales and market share.
Threats
▪ Threats refer to factors that have the potential to harm an organization. For example, a drought is a
threat to a wheat-producing company, as it may destroy or reduce the crop yield. Other common
threats include things like rising costs for materials, increasing competition, tight labor supply. and so
on.

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PESTLE Analysis
▪ A PESTLE analysis is a framework to analyse the key factors (Political, Economic, Sociological,
Technological, Legal and Environmental) influencing an organisation from the outside.
▪ It offers people professionals insight into the external factors impacting their organisation. The
analysis is flexible, so organisations can use it in a range of different scenarios. People professionals
and senior managers can use the results to guide strategic decision-making.

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Political Factors
▪ These are all about how and to what degree a government intervenes in the economy.
This can include – government policy, political stability or instability in overseas markets,
foreign trade policy, tax policy, labour law, environmental law, trade restrictions and so on.
▪ It is clear from the list above that political factors often have an impact on organisations
and how they do business. Organisations need to be able to respond to the current and
anticipated future legislation, and adjust their marketing policy accordingly.
Economic Factors
▪ Economic factors have a significant impact on how an organisation does business and
also how profitable they are. Factors include – economic growth, interest rates, exchange
rates, inflation, disposable income of consumers and businesses and so on.
▪ These factors can be further broken down into macro-economical and micro-economical
factors. Macro-economical factors deal with the management of demand in any given
economy. Governments use interest rate control, taxation policy and government
expenditure as their main mechanisms they use for this.

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Social Factors
▪ Also known as socio-cultural factors, are the areas that involve the shared belief and
attitudes of the population. These factors include – population growth, age distribution,
health consciousness, career attitudes and so on. These factors are of particular interest as
they have a direct effect on how marketers understand customers and what drives them.
Technological Factors
▪ We all know how fast the technological landscape changes and how this impacts the way
we market our products. Technological factors affect marketing and the management
thereof in three distinct ways:
• New ways of producing goods and services
• New ways of distributing goods and services
• New ways of communicating with target markets

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Environmental Factors
▪ These factors have only really come to the forefront in the last fifteen years or so. They
have become important due to the increasing scarcity of raw materials, pollution targets,
doing business as an ethical and sustainable company, carbon footprint targets set by
governments (this is a good example where one factor could be classed as political and
environmental at the same time).
▪ These are just some of the issues marketers are facing within this factor. More and more
consumers are demanding that the products they buy are sourced ethically, and if possible
from a sustainable source.
Legal Factors
▪ Legal factors include - health and safety, equal opportunities, advertising standards,
consumer rights and laws, product labelling and product safety. It is clear that companies
need to know what is and what is not legal in order to trade successfully.
▪ If an organisation trades globally this becomes a very tricky area to get right as each
country has its own set of rules and regulations.

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5C Analysis
▪ 5C Analysis is a marketing
framework to analyze the environment
in which a company operates.
▪ It can provide insight into the key
drivers of success, as well as the risk
exposure to various environmental
factors.
▪ The 5Cs are Company,
Collaborators, Customers,
Competitors, and Context.

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Company
▪ When analyzing a company using the 5C marketing framework, the key issue is to identify
the Sustainable Competitive Advantage that belongs to the focal company. It can be in the
form of brand equity, economies of scale, technological development, etc.
▪ To identify if the focal company has a sustainable competitive advantage, the VRIO
(Variable Rare Imitable Organized) model can be utilized to distinguish if a company’s
assets offer a temporary or sustainable advantage.
Collaborators
▪ Collaborators are entities that allow or enhance a company’s ability to provide its
particular good or service in the way that it does. This factor primarily revolves around a
company’s supply chain, that ranges from spot contracts up to quasi-vertical integration.
▪ The direction of integration can only be upstream, as downstream collaborators are more
specifically defined as customers in the 5C Analysis framework.

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Customers
▪ The group of potential customers a company can reach with its products or services can
be broken down into three main sizes: Total Available Market, Serviceable Available Market,
and the Serviceable Obtainable Market. The market segments may be further segmented
through demographics, psychographics, geography, and other distinguishing factors.
Competitors
▪ Competition can be found in the form of other companies operating in the same industry
as the focal company. To determine the industry, industry classification systems such as the
North American Industry Classification System exist to provide a standardized method of
defining an industry.
Context
▪ The context in which a business operates is most often analyzed with the use of PESTEL
analysis. It provides coverage into the areas that may affect a business, but where the
business exercises either no or limited control. Changes to contextual factors may impact
the industry as a whole rather than a particular company. As such, an advantage
experienced by such changes may not translate into a competitive advantage for the focal
company or vice versa.

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3.2.3 Competitive Analysis (BCG Matrix)
▪ Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Matrix is a
four celled matrix (a 2 * 2 matrix) developed by
BCG, USA. It is the most renowned corporate
portfolio analysis tool.
▪ It provides a graphic representation for an
organization to examine different businesses in
its portfolio based on their related market share
and industry growth rates. It is a two-
dimensional analysis on management of SBU’s
(Strategic Business Units).
▪ Relative Market Share = SBU Sales this year
leading competitors sales this year.
Market Growth Rate = Industry sales this year -
Industry Sales last year.

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▪ Stars- Stars represent business units having large market share in a fast growing industry.
They may generate cash but because of fast growing market, stars require huge investments to
maintain their lead. Net cash flow is usually modest. SBU’s located in this cell are attractive as
they are located in a robust industry and these business units are highly competitive in the
industry.
▪ Cash Cows- Cash Cows represents business units having a large market share in a mature,
slow growing industry. Cash cows require little investment and generate cash that can be utilized
for investment in other business units. These SBU’s are the corporation’s key source of cash
and are specifically the core business. They are the base of an organization. These businesses
usually follow stability strategies.
▪ Question Marks- Question marks represent business units having low relative market share
and located in a high growth industry. They require huge amount of cash to maintain or gain
market share. They require attention to determine if the venture can be viable. Question marks
are generally new goods and services which have a good commercial prospective.
▪ Dogs- Dogs represent businesses having weak market shares in low-growth markets. They
neither generate cash nor require huge amount of cash. Due to low market share, these
business units face cost disadvantages. Generally, retrenchment strategies are adopted
because these firms can gain market share only at the expense of competitor’s/rival firms.
These business firms have weak market share because of high costs, poor quality, ineffective
marketing, etc.
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Thank you!

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