Market Strategy:
Where is the business going?
To many executives with an overly keen eye on short-term marketing impact, Market Strategy is an unglamourous and easily overlooked aspect of marketing. Yet its importance cannot be understated. It represents the link between your organisation’s business strategy and ultimately how you spend your marketing budget at the operational level.
Particularly in the world of services marketing where defendable uniqueness is often hard to come by, Market Strategy has a significant role to play in determining whether or not your organisation’s strategic goals have genuine potential to be achieved. So, ignore it at your peril!
A fully developed Market Strategy translates the organisation’s business strategy into a market-oriented map of receptive markets, organisational competences, professional capabilities, commercial differentiators, purchasing criteria and competitive weaknesses. Market Strategy may be developed at Board-level, or by those responsible for autonomous business units or service lines. It provides a firm foundation for solid market planning and marketing execution, enabling all parts of the organisation to participate in taking a common, agreed service message to the marketplace.
This final point cannot be overstated. Everything which happens inside a people-centric services-led business ultimately has the potential to impact upon how the market perceives the capability and quality of that business. Going that extra mile within the organisation to address discrete, pre-defined markets with core service messaging, delivered consistently by the entire organisation will be warmly welcomed by target audiences, and is often recognised as a service differentiator in itself. A fully developed Market Strategy, to which executives and employees are committed, ensures that all future operational marketing activities directly reflect the strategic business goals of the organisation, and support how the organisation wishes to be perceived in the marketplace.
However, for many businesses, the reality is very different. The strategic planning cycle often progresses directly from Board-level strategising to discussions of an operational marketing nature, such as: How much can we spend on advertising this year?, Which events shall we attend?, Does the website need to be re-designed?. With budgets approved, there is understandable pressure to ‘get out there and do it!’. Yet, by this point, the typical business strategy has failed to address key market-related questions, and buy-in across the organisation to the marketing approach is often fragmented or contradictory.
We address these issues directly using the ConnOptix Market Strategy Framework.
