Operationalizing strategic marketing

The strategic marketing process, like any administrative practice, is far simpler to conceptualize than operationalize within an organization. It is for this reason that this chapter focused on providing practical techniques and strategies for implementing the strategic marketing process. First and foremost, the marketing effort needs to be marketed to the various publics of the organization. This chapter advocated the need to organize the marketing analysis into organizational, competitive, and market phases, and it provided examples of possible designs of the phases. The importance and techniques for exhausting secondary data sources and conducting efficient primary data collection methods were explained and illustrated. Strategies for determining marketing opportunities and threats, as well as segmenting markets, were detailed. The chapter provided techniques for developing marketing strategies, including considering the five patterns of coverage available; determining competitor's position and the marketing mix; examining the stage of the product life cycle; and employing a consumer decision model. The importance of developing explicit objectives, goals, and detailed action plans was emphasized. Finally, helpful hints for operationalizing the communication variable and evaluating marketing programs were provided.