Planning & Strategy Articles & Resources
How To Write A Marketing Communications Strategy To gain strategic advantage in your Marketing Communication Strategy, an organisation has to formulate and implement a value-creating strategy - that is, a comprehensive set of decisions and commitments on the direction to take in order to fully achieve its aims and goals. This process begins [.....]
Integrated Marketing Strategy For your Integrated Marketing Strategy to be effective, start with the audit. In conducting the marketing organisation audit the McKinsey 7-S model is extremely useful - it provides a framework for analysing seven important aspects of any organisation: structure, systems, strategy, shared values, staffing, skills and style. The three following elements [.....]
How To Create an Integrated Marketing Plan Integrated Marketing Plan Campaign objectives Marketing communications objectives form part of an organisational hierarchy of objectives - marketing objectives cascade down from the organisational objectives, and communication objectives cascade down from marketing objectives. All objectives should be ‘SMART’ - Specific, Measurable, Achievable/Actionable, Relevant and Time-bound. Typical [.....]
A Marketing Information System is basically a way of regularly gathering and giving helpful marketing information to the right people at the right time. The key element is knowing what kind of information is needed by whom and when. Information needs, information sources and information costs change over time and so a review, or information [.....]
Tomorrow morning you are going to wake up, breakfast, and leave the house. On the way to the bus-stop or the station you will buy a newspaper. Which one? The prices are different. How much will you pay? Prices vary according to situations. Different prices reflect what different customers are prepared, and able, to pay. [.....]
Let's look at Strategy. Strategy is a word that generates much confusion because different people use it in different ways. And of course, there are different levels of strategy. For example: Corporate Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Advertising Strategy, Creative Strategy, Media Strategy. Regardless of level, strategy can be defined as the overall direction which summarises how [.....]
Although, 'product', in marketing terms, can mean goods and services, we are going to concentrate on goods. In a pure marketing sense, products themselves have no value. But their benefits do. Customers buy benefits. Although products are made in factories, what customers buy are the benefits. Cars are bought not because they are cars but [.....]
A segment is a unique group of customers (or potential customers) who share some common characteristics which make them different from other groups of customers. People are different. Some segments may have different needs, they may require different versions of the same product; they may pay different prices; they may buy in different places; they [.....]
Positioning is all about how a brand or company is positioned, or perceived, in the minds of a target group of customers. Perceptual maps help us to plan positionings and repositionings. A perceptual map is a diagram which plots different positionings and repositionings. For example Guinness was positioned as an 'old unfashionable mature drinker's drink' [.....]
The Importance of Motivating Channel Members Imagine these three scenarios: You are a producer of 'Grand Pens' a brand of fountain pens. A customer seeks advice from a pen shop on which pen to buy and the retailer strongly recommends yours. A customer asks a retailer, who stocks your pen, for another brand called [.....]
Direct Marketing gives an organisation access to the target market without any intermediaries. The customer is sold to inside their own home or office. And delivery follows, directly into the home or the office. This is 'armchair shopping' since customers do not have to go out, shop and traipse wearily home again. For example, pizza [.....]
Integrated Marketing Communications Integrated Marketing Communications is a simple concept. It ensures that all forms of communications and messages are carefully linked together. At its most basic level, Integrated Marketing Communications, or IMC, as we'll call it, means integrating all the promotional tools, so that they work together in harmony. Promotion is one [.....]
