Developing marketing strategies and plans

Marketing Management Tasks
These core concepts and others provide the input for a set of tasks that make up successful marketing management.

Zeus, Inc. (name disguised), operates in several industries, including chemicals, cameras, and film. The company is organized into SBUs. Corporate management is considering what to do with its Atlas camera division. At present, Atlas produces a range of 35 mm and digital cameras. The market for cameras is intensely competitive. Although Zeus has a sizable market share and is producing much revenue for the company, the 35 mm market itself is growing very slowly and its market share is slipping. In the faster-growing digital camera segment, Zeus is facing strong competition and has been slow to gain sales. Zeus’s corporate management wants Atlas’s marketing group to produce a strong turnaround plan for the division. Marketing management has to come up with a convincing marketing plan, sell corporate management on the plan, and then implement and control it.

Developing marketing strategies and plans
The first task facing Atlas is to identify its potential long-run opportunities given its market experience and core competencies. Atlas can design its cameras with better features. It can also considering a line of video cameras or it can use its core competency in optics to design a line of binoculars and telescopes. Whichever direction it chooses, it must develop concrete market plans that specify the marketing strategy and tactics going forward.

Capturing marketing insights
To understand what is happening inside and outside company, Atlas needs a reliable marketing information system; it will want to closely motor its marketing environment.
Atlas’s microenvironment consists of all the players 10 affect the company’s ability to produce and sell cameras-suppliers, marketing inter diaries, customers, and competitors. Its macro environment consists of demographic, economic, physical, technological, political-legal, and social-cultural forces that affect sales and profits.

Atlas also needs a dependable marketing research system. Marketing research is an indispensable tool for assessing buyer wants and behavior and actual and potential market size. An important part of gathering environmental information includes measuring market potential and forecasting future demand. To transform marketing strategy into market: programs marketing managers must make basic decisions on marketing expenditures, marketing activities, and marketing allocation. How many dollars should support Atlas’s or three camera lines? Direct versus distributor sales? Direct-mail advertising versus trade-magazine advertising? East Coast markets versus West Coast markets? To make these allocations, marketing managers may use sales-response functions that show how sales d profits would be affected by the amount of money spent in each application.

Connecting with customers
Atlas must consider how to best create value for its chosen target markets and develop strong, profitable, long-term relationships with customers. To do so, Atlas needs to understand consumer markets. How many house holds plan to buy cameras? Who buys and why do they buy? What are they looking for in the way of features and prices? Where do they shop? What are their images: different brands? How does the digital segment differ from the 35 mm segment? Atlas also sells cameras to business markets, including large corporations, professional firms, retailers, and government agencies. Purchasing agents or buying committees make the decisions. Atlas needs to gain a full understanding of how organizational buyers buy. It needs a sales force that is well trained in presenting product benefits.

Atlas will not want to market to all possible customers. Modern marketing practice calls for dividing the market into major market segments, evaluating each segment, and targeting those market segments that the company can best serve.

BUILDING STRONG BRANDS
Atlas must understand the strengths and weaknesses of the Zeus brand with customers. Is it so strongly associated with certain technologies that it could not be used to brand new products in related categories? Is its 35 mm film heritage a detriment in the digital camera market? Suppose Atlas decides to focus on the consumer market and develop a positioning strategy. Should Atlas position its cameras as the “Cadillac” brand, offering superior cameras at a premium price with excellent service and strong advertising? Should it build a simple, low-priced camera aimed at more price-conscious consumers? Should it develop a medium-quality, medium priced camera? After launch the product’s strategy will need modification at the different stages in the product life cycle: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Furthermore, strategy choice will depend on whether the firm is a market leader, challenger or follower. Atlas must also pay close attention to competitors, anticipating its competitors’ moves and knowing how to react quickly and decisively. It may want to initiate some surprise moves, in which case it needs to anticipate how its competitors will respond.