Strategic Planning, Implementation

and Control

Strategic planning takes place at four levels: -corporate, -division, -business unit, -product

The aim of strategic planning is to shape the company’s businesses and products to yield the targeted profits and growth

analyzing market opportunities, developing marketing strategies, planning marketing programs, managing marketing effort.

The marketing process consists of four steps:

The Strategic Planning, Implementation, and Control Process

Market-oriented strategic planning is the managerial process of developing and maintaining a viable fit among the organization’s

objectives, skills, resources its changing market opportunities.

the world's largest food manufacturer, develops an overall strategic plan at its headquarters in Vevey,Switzerland.

Below that, each strategic group, such as confectionery, develops subordinate strategic plans. These feed into the strategic plan's national operations.

At each level, marketing and other functional plans will exist. At the finallevel, brand plans cover the marketing of brands such as Kit Kat, Lion.

For instance Nestle, the world's largest

the mission, the strategic objectives, the strategic audit, SWOT analysis, portfolio analysis, objectives and strategies.

All of these feed from and feed into marketing plans.

The strategic plan contains several components:

A mission states the purpose of a company. Firms often start with a clear mission held within the mind of their founder. Then, over time, the mission fades as the company acquires new products and markets.

The Mission

“to honorably serve the needs of the community by providing products and services of superior quality at a fair price to our customers; to do this so as to earn an adequate profit which is required for the total enterprise to grow; and by so doing provide the opportunity for our employees and shareholders to achieve their reasonable personal objectives.”

The mission statement of Motorola, for example

SWOT analysis draws the critical strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) from the strategic audit. The audit contains a wealth of data of differing importance and reliability. SWOT analysis distils these data to show the critical items from the internal and external audit.

SWOT Analysis

Opportunities and Threats

Opportunities:• Economic climate• Demographic changes• Market• Technology

Threats • Competitive activity

• Channel pressure• Demographic changes• Politics

A major pet food manufacturer could pitch the following strengths and weaknesses against the opportunities and threats

Strengths:• Market leader in the dry eat

food market.• Access to the group's leading

world position in food technology.

• Market leader in luxury pet foods.

• The group's excellent worldwide grocery distribution.

• Pet food market leader in several big markets, including France, Italy, Spain and South America.

Weakn esses:• Number three in the wet pet

food market.• Excessive product range with

several low-volume brands.• Most brand names are little

known, and are cluttered following acquisitions.

• Relatively low advertising and promotions budget.

• Product range needs many manufacturing skills.

• Poor store presence in several large markets: Germany, UK, USA and Canada.

• Overall poor profits performance.

What is our business? Who is the customer? What is of value to the customer? What will our business be? What should our business be?

Successful companies continuously raise these questions and answer them thoughtfully and thoroughly.

According to Peter Drucker, it is time to ask some fundamental questions to determine objectives

The Business Strategic-Planning Process

The company has performed a SWOT analysis of the internal and external environments, it can proceed to develop specific goals for the planning period in a process called goal formulation.

Goal Formulation

To be effective, goals must

(1) be arranged hierarchically to guide the businesses in moving from broad to specific objectives for departments and individuals;

(2) (2) be stated quantitatively whenever possible; (3) (3) be realistic;

(4) (4) be consistent.

Strategy Formulation

Goals indicate what a business unit wants to achieve; strategy describes the game planfor achieving those goals.

Michael Porter has condensed them into three generic types that provide a good starting point for strategic thinking:

overall cost leadership, differentiation, focus.

Overall cost leadership: Here the business works to achieve the lowest production and distribution costs so that it can price lower than competitors and win more market share

Differentiation: Here the business concentrates on achieving superior performance in an important customer benefit area, such as being the leader in service, quality,style, or technology—but not leading in all of these things.

Focus: Here the business focuses on one or more narrow market segments, getting to know these segments intimately and pursuing either cost leadership or differentiation within the target segment.

Program FormulationOnce the business unit has developed its principal strategies, it must work out detailed supporting programs.

ImplementationImplementation is vital to effective management of the marketing process.

Feedback and ControlAs it implements its strategy, the firm needs to track the results and monitor new developments in the internal and external environments.

The control process