Entrepreneurs, large companies and small businesses alike, all have to invest in understanding and connecting with their consumers. Still, most products and services that perform merely as promised are rejected in the marketplace – fit-for-purpose alone is no longer a competitive advantage.
So, designers must not only integrate functionality and form, they must also understand a customer or client’s thought process in order to motivate behaviour change. Without change, brand preference is static or nonexistent.
Our Strategic Marketing Process provides a step by step approach to analysing a business currently, making assumptions based on internal and external environments in which the business operates and developing plans to accomplish mutually negotiated marketing outcomes. From the discovery process outlined above, detailed plans and programmes would be established to accomplish the marketing outcomes. It’s at this stage that budgets and measurement metrics would be determined.
Our Strategic Marketing Process includes 6 stages that are implemented as required:
The Why
Situational Analysis
Marketing Assumption
Marketing Objectives
Strategic Action Plan To Meet Objectives
Implementation
Understand The Why
- We establish why the organisation exists – not the What and How but the Why?
- What does the organisation do?
- How does the organisation and its services or products benefit its targeted customers?
Conduct Situational Analysis
- Evaluate external and internal factors that impact on the business
- Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of an organisation – (SWOT or similar exercises are utilised to assist this process)
- Discovery of competitor set
- Brand and marketing collateral audit
Establish Marketing Assumptions
- Determine basic elements of what key marketing success will look like
- Establish business assumptions based on specific potential marketing activity
Define Marketing Objectives
- Determine quantitative, measurable targets (e.g. revenue/profit/sales or market share)
- Allocate timelines for each objective
- Investigate product or service development and/or enhancement
- Investigate new market opportunities
Create Strategic Action Plan To Meet Objectives
- Reach out to selected target markets – identify, describe and quantify
- Analyse geographical and socioeconomic attributes of target markets
- Analyse purchasing habits by end user
- Determine pricing strategy
- Determine distribution strategy
- Identify how the target markets prefer to receive information
- Create implementation tactics for reach and influence
- Identify marketing tool kit for communications/advertising/promotions
- Creative brief preparation for collateral activity
- Analyse internal resources and culture for meeting the negotiated marketing objectives
- Evaluation for measuring performance against objectives
Implement Strategic Action Plan
- Determine allocation of resources, internal and external to facilitate plan
- Establish timelines for implementation of plan components
- Roll out action plan
- Set up reporting functions
