50-200 word discussion on marketing discussion

Mission statement

The mission statement should answer the following questions about the business:

· Who am I?

· Type of hotel—product focus and need

· Quality level—luxury, first-class, budget

· Business mix

· What are the key market segments I serve?

· What makes me unique?

· Salience, determinance, and importance

· Who are the key competitors whose success directly affects my business?

· Who are my constituents—formal and informal groups (employees, unions, suppliers, regulators/inspectors, and so on)—whose efforts on my behalf may contribute to success?

· How will I improve over the next 3-5 years?

The answers to these questions help organizations define their target markets and their business mix.

Strategy

Strategy involves matching opportunities with corporate capability. The strategic window of opportunity is a limited period during which the combination of an opportunity and the firm's ability to exploit it exists.

Breakthrough Opportunities are opportunities that help innovators develop hard-to-copy marketing strategies that will be very profitable for a long time. There must be a match or "fit" between the target market opportunity and the company's resources.

Competitive Advantage means that a firm has a marketing mix which the target market sees as better than a competitor's mix. The goal of strategic planning is to gain a sustainable competitive advantage.

An organization with a production orientation would focus on achieving a competitive advantage by increasing production efficiencies to develop a production cost advantage. A company with a sales orientation would develop a competitive advantage by having a more persuasive sales message. A firm with a marketing orientation would achieve a competitive advantage by satisfying consumers' needs.

Unless the company has some overriding competitive advantage, the target market selected should be served by only a few, small competitors.

Analysis

There are two schools of thoughts regarding what happens after an opportunity is identified. The traditional belief is that marketers must conduct an environmental analysis to analyze the sociocultural, demographic, economic, technological, political and legal, competitive, and ecological environments. Marketers use the data they've gathered in an environmental analysis to conduct a SWOT analysis, identifying the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with their enterprise. In concert with the identification of organizational resources, this enables organizations to define marketing objectives and a unique competitive advantage.

The opposing, and more nascent view, known as the Effectual Approach, is that analogical reasoning based on experience should be used to make marketing decisions, whereas predictive information should be ignored or given little weight. The goal is to control outcomes, co-create value through partnerships, and transform situations to achieve desired results.

Read, Stuart, Nicholas Dew, Saras D. Sarasvathy, Michael Song, and Robert Wiltbank (2009), "Marketing Under Uncertainty: The Logic of an Effectual Approach," Journal of Marketing, 73 (3), 1-18. Tactics

Under the traditional approach, organizations develop product, place, price, and product strategies for each target market based on resource and capability constraints; develop actionable tactics to implement strategy; and identify all resources needed for implementation.

As part of this stage, they also create a set of tools such as budget and pro-forma income statements for the next five years. These are used to perform a business analysis to ensure the direction the firm is taking will be a profitable one, to determine the actual cost of the business tactics, and to identify how much income the firm expects to generate. In addition, accountability controls and methods of evaluation are developed to assist with the review process that will follow at a later time.

Contingency plans are also created so that organizations are prepared to respond rapidly to minor changes in their situations.

Following the effectual approach, the belief is that markets and products can be broadly transformed when moving along the path from concept to acceptance. Thus, alternative markets are more likely to be considered, pricing is likely to follow a skimming strategy, and channel strategies are more likely to focus on partnerships serving a narrow customer segment. Succinctly, the effectual approach is focused on relationships, networking, equity, co-creation, humans, and operant resources.

Review

During this phase, marketers re-examine strategies to ensure their continued fit with the organization's defined objectives as well as the prevailing environmental constraints. Further, they review and evaluate the effectiveness of their tactics based on the accountability controls, methods of evaluation, and contingency plans they established earlier.

Strategy

On the basis of their review, it may be necessary to revise strategies and even, in the most extreme circumstances, the mission statement. Such revisions lead to consequent revisions in tactical implementations, which are followed by another review cycle, another round of revisions, another review cycle, another round of revisions, and so on.