Robert Hamper - The Ultimate Guide to Strategic Marketing: Real World Methods for Developing Successful, Long-term Marketing Plans

Copyright 2014 by Robert J. Hamper. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To Koko and Kassie
whose support was always there

Contents

Preface

The Ultimate Guide to Strategic Marketing illustrates and explains how to build a dynamic, future-oriented marketing plan for your company. This book provides the following:

An overview of the marketing planning process.Qualitative tools to help you determine your companys vision/mission statement, goals, objectives, and environmental assessments.Quantitative tools to define your firms strengths, weaknesses, and resources; to take stock of the competitive situation; and to assess your risk and opportunities.Questionnaires that you can use to generate the data you need if you are to create a three- to five-year dynamic marketing plan for your firm.A running sample case that illustrates the principles in each chapter and provides examples of completed questionnaires, forms, and matrices.To help you develop your marketing plans, the following topics are covered:. This section provides an overview of the entire planning process.. This section evaluates and develops situation analysis, environmental/competitive position, product positioning, strategic portfolio analysis, and problem and opportunity analysis. Starting with a close look at the internal and external environment of your firm, it determines your strengths and weaknesses, and formulates opportunities for you to focus on objective and strategic development.. This section helps you to set marketing objectives for your firm, select strategies that will be in balance with your objectives, determine your optimal market segments and the products you should develop, and choose the final marketing strategies that will help your firm succeed.. Many firms fail because their strategies are poorly implemented and communicated to the people who are responsible for carrying them out. This section indicates common pitfalls to avoid and provides guidelines to make sure that your plan gets off to a sound start.

How to Use This Book

The Ultimate Guide to Strategic Marketing is a practical guide to the planning process. It is not intended to give you in-depth marketing theory or to discuss tactics under a wide variety of conditions.

The emphasis is on developing a proactive marketing plan that will give your firm a blueprint for future growth. To get the greatest benefit from strategic marketing planning, it is recommended that you follow these steps:

1. Read through the chapter material before you fill out any questionnaires, checklists, or diagrams.

2. Realize that finding out what you dont know is as valuable as the information that you do know. Gaps in data can often reveal a companys problems and weaknesses. Use the questionnaires, checklists, and diagrams to discover where you need to learn more about your companys operations, the competition, and the marketplace.

Make sure that managers and staff members have a chance to review the completed forms and make comments. The more broad-based your data are within the company, the more accurate and sound they are likely to be.

3. Work through the book in sequence. A common mistake in developing plans is to skip steps. The data you develop for each step in the marketing plan will serve as a starting point for the next step.

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the following people in the development of this book:

Rosemary Camilleri, PhD

Diane J. Janowiak, MA

Mary J. Kipta, MBA

Richard S. Kipta

Special thanks to Casie Vogel, editor and Daina Penikas, editing supervisor for making this book possible.

Robert J. Hamper

River Forest, IL

PART I
The Marketing Planning Process

Starting Out

Introduction

The pace of social and economic change is accelerating in every sector, and with it, the risk of doing business is increasing. Competition is becoming stiffer as global marketing, e-commerce, and emerging markets are growing at a dizzying pace. In a world of look-alike products and services, your firm must find a way to stand out, and if it does not, it will not be competitive in the marketplace. You must hit the right target market with exactly the right product. You need only look at the cell phone market, where certain once-dominant players did not keep up with the latest technology and/or did not offer the right product. As a result, many of them lost substantial market share or are no longer in business. Brand loyalty will last for only a short while if products in the marketplace are ill conceived and poorly designed.

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