TABLE OF CONTENTS Increasingly competitive market conditions require strategic responses. Strategic decisions define core competencies and integrate activities. Strategic management recognizes the importance of implementation and managing change. Essentially, strategic marketing management, and subsequent marketing strategies, contribute to overall business goals via a three-stage process: analysis, formulation and implementation.
The concept of marketing is inherently simple business success via a process of understanding and meeting customer needs. Few would argue with this basic principle, and even the most inexperienced of business managers would intuitively see the sense in this. Given this basic simplicity, why do we need something as complicated, and time-consuming, as a marketing strategy?
While basic business principles may be simple common sense, achievement involves many complex, interdependent or even conflicting tasks. Increasingly, such tasks are undertaken against a backdrop of constant change, intense competition and limited resources. To further enhance the challenge, managers are often at the mercy of incomplete data and unexpected events, often being left to second guess customer and competitor reactions. It is to this end that marketing strategy has become a vital component of success. A well-considered, effectively implemented, marketing strategy should go some way to alleviating such problems and reduce the complexity of business tasks. Strategy should restore simplicity to the art of management. In essence, it is a series of tools and techniques that guide (hopefully) the organization to the marketing panacea success via a process of understanding and meeting customer needs.
The modern business world now...
