Marketing Strategy

Ansoff’s matrix offers strategic choices to marketing managers. Ansoff’s has four main categories.

The Balanced Scorecard is an approach that can be used by strategic marketing managers to control, and keep track of, key performance indicators. In fact the scorecard itself is designed to be wholly strategic since it contains long-term outcomes and drivers of success. There are four zones in a balanced scorecard namely financial, customers, business…

Like Ansoff’s matrix, the Boston Matrix is a well known tool for the marketing manager.

The ‘Strategy Clock’ is based upon the work of Cliff Bowman (see C. Bowman and D. Faulkner ‘Competitve and Corporate Strategy – Irwin – 1996). It’s another suitable way to analyze a company’s competitive position in comparison to the offerings of competitors.

Learning outcome: By the end of this lesson, you will be able to explain how Carroll’s CSR Pyramid, Freeman’s Stakeholder Theory, and Elkington’s Triple Bottom Line each treat ethics and sustainability as strategic questions, not just operational ones. Why Do Ethics and Sustainability Belong in a Strategy Course? It is tempting to treat ethics and…

Five Forces Analysis helps the marketer to contrast a competitive environment. It has similarities with other tools for environmental audit, such as PEST analysis, but tends to focus on the single, stand alone, business or SBU (Strategic Business Unit) rather than a single product or range of products.

Generic strategies were at their most popular in the early 1980s. They outline the three main strategic options open to organization that wish to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Zipf’s law states that if a collection of items is ranked by popularity the second item will have around half the popularity of the first one and the third item will have about a third of the of the popularity of the first one and so on.

Learning outcome: By the end of this lesson, you will be able to explain why strategy implementation requires organisational change, describe Narver and Slater’s three components of market orientation and Day’s market-driven capabilities, and identify common barriers that stop a good strategy from being delivered. Why Does Strategy Implementation Need Organisational Change? Every tool covered…

Learning outcome: By the end of this lesson, you will be able to explain what TOWS analysis is, apply its four strategy types (SO, WO, ST, WT), and use it to turn a SWOT audit into a specific, actionable strategy. What Is TOWS Analysis? TOWS analysis is a strategic planning tool that takes the four…

The value chain is a systematic approach to examining the development of competitive advantage. It was created by M. E. Porter in his book, Competitive Advantage (1980). The chain consists of a series of activities that create and build value. They culminate in the total value delivered by an organisation.

The term value curve appears in three key Harvard Business Review articles by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, as well as their 2005 book – Blue Ocean Strategy. The value curve is a tool for strategic managers to see visually how their strategy works in relation to close competitors.

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to explain what a marketing strategy is, how it differs from day-to-day marketing tactics, and how the three stages of analysis, choice and implementation fit together to guide a business toward its objectives. What Is Marketing Strategy? A marketing strategy is a plan for how…