Marketing Strategy Elements

Traditionally, marketing strategy has been viewed as consisting of:

• Product Strategy: People are looking for specific need fulfillments when they buy a product. A good product strategy would identify the needs people are seeking to fulfill with your product and then develop a product that meets those needs in a great way. Product strategy can also include such tactics as getting people to buy your profitable product repetitively by making you captive, e.g. HP offers a dirt cheap printer and then you have to buy the high-priced ink-cartridges for that printer on a regular basis. Product also includes after-sales support, and a great support can be a great selling point.
• Pricing Strategy: People compare prices offered by different sellers and typically buy the lower priced product if features are similar. Price-cutting is not a recommended strategy unless you have a strong cost advantage because competitors typically retaliate with their own price cuts and soon margins can disappear. For certain products, it is a high price that is the selling point. Luxury products, such as a BMW, become exclusive products signaling that its owner is a wealthy person who can afford the high price.
• Place (Distribution Strategy): A good product priced attractively and promoted effectively can still fail to generate sales volumes if it is not available to prospective buyers at outlets that are convenient to them. It is the distribution strategy adopted by the producer that can ensure availability of the product at places where buyers look for it. Distribution can be through own outlets, intermediaries like wholesalers and retailers or over the Web (sell on the Web and ship through couriers).
• Promotional Strategy: A wide range of tactics are adopted to get the product to the notice of prospective clients and convince them that your product fulfills their needs better than competing products. Advertising, brand building, sales promotion and public relations are major tactics that is implemented through varying means. To be effective, the promotional effort must reach real prospects and talk to them in a language that appeals to them.

Each of the strategies above involves a range of issues and offer varied options, as briefly hinted while outlining the strategies. Each strategy will have to be developed in a manner that is appropriate to the product and the market. Innovative strategies can work provided they click with the customer.

Developing the Marketing Strategy

The product, price, distribution and promotional strategies are developed after a detailed analysis of the customer, company, competitors, partners and the context. Customers are not typically homogeneous groups and different customer segments and their needs will have to be identified. Company analysis can reveal the special strengths of a company that can be exploited to develop an effective strategy.

Competition analysis is particularly important to identify the options for developing a competitive advantage. And profiling partners such as suppliers, distributors and associates can open up less obvious strategic possibilities.

We will look at the marketing strategy development process in a separate article.