In the history of business, there has never been a greater need to develop marketing strategies that spell out quantitatively how the organization plans to create sustainable competitive advantage over the planning period— typically 3 years. Any such strategy that doesn’t clearly justify why customers should buy the organisation’s products/services at margins that will create super profits isn’t worth anything.
Strategic Marketing Planning is simply a logical process and a series of activities leading to the setting of marketing objectives and the formulation of plans for achieving them. Although simple to grasp intellectually, strategic marketing planning is notoriously the most difficult of all marketing tasks. Over the past 40 years, we have specialized in this topic and helped hundreds of organisations to produce winning strategic plans. Indeed, the book on this topic, Marketing Plans: How to Prepare Them, How to Use Them, has sold over half a million copies worldwide, and it is acknowledged as the “bible” on this subject. Its relevance today has never been greater, and the 8th edition has just been launched.
The ten steps for strategic marketing planning has worked brilliantly over many years, and we are truly considered to be the world’s experts in this domain. Essentially, developing and planning for a marketing strategy is about four things:
How to get the market/customer selection process right.
b. How to get growth in sales and profits from existing customers.
c. How to reduce expenditure on markets/customer that earn less than the cost of capital.
d. How to reduce risk by creating shareholder value.
Typically, when running workshops on this topic, we start with at least a half day briefing for the Board, to ensure buy-in. Then, we bring in a much larger group – not just marketers – a senior, multi-discipline team from sales, marketing, operations and finance; it is the whole organisation that delivers the resulting strategy, and it is important that they buy into the resulting plans. In short, the plans we help (and coach) you develop maximize the financial value of market/customer relationships – the sum total of the revenues, minus the directly attributable costs now and in the future. Last, not least, we also have created a marketing business game, which can be used to reinforce the learning.
About Malcolm McDonald Consulting
The fees for the Board induction, following workshops, coaching and consulting support reflect the time and effort required for customisation and pre planning work. Engagement of our team of consultants with client organizations and businesses usually results in an increase in net profits of up to 10%.
Two Action Points:
Assess the need in your team and business unit, in current business context.
- Action: Bring together a multidisciplinary team, from marketing, sales, operations and finance to discuss how your sales and marketing plans bring profits from market/customer relationships.
Assess the nature of the support you may need to address the key issues identified internally.
- Action: Ask about our FREE marketing planning diagnostic, and meet Professor McDonald to agree the best course of action and resources needed to get your marketing plans back on track.