Marketing Strategies

SECTION I: MARKETING STRATEGIES

1. Introduction: A marketing strategy is an organisation’s integrated pattern of decisions that specify its crucial choices concerning the products, markets and marketing activities, aiming to create, communicate, and deliver value to customers, sustainably.

2. Strategic Marketing Analysis: This step involves understanding the business environment (PESTLE analysis), industry analysis (Porter’s five forces), competitor analysis, and understanding customer needs and behaviour.

3. Establishing Marketing Objectives: These are goals set by the business for promoting its products and services. These could include increasing market share, maximising customer satisfaction, expanding into new markets, or launching new products.

4. Target Market Selection: This involves identifying and understanding the specific group of people a company wants to reach with its products and services. It includes the use of market segmentation (demographic, geographic, psychographic, behavioural), targeting and positioning.

5. Marketing Mix Decision:
   • Product Decisions: This involves decisions on the product or service’s features, branding, packaging, and services.
   • Price Decisions: It involves the cost of producing the good or service and the pricing strategy.
   • Place Decisions: It refers to the distribution networks used to deliver the product or service to the target market.
   • Promotion Decisions: It covers the various ways of communicating and selling to the customers.

6. Market Differentiation and Positioning: It involves establishing a unique position or identity in the minds of the target market that differentiates the business from its competitors.

7. Marketing Implementation: This involves putting the marketing strategy into practise, through detailed planning, budgeting and monitoring.

8. Control and Evaluation: This includes the use of marketing metrics to monitor and adjust the marketing strategy. Techniques such as marketing audits, SWOT analysis, variance analysis can be used for evaluation.

9. Digital Marketing Strategy: This implies the use of digital tools and channels like websites, social media, email, SEO, and online advertising to promote a product or service.

10. Ethical Marketing: It is about making marketing decisions that are morally right and socially responsible. This includes fair competition, truth in advertising, respect for consumer privacy and ethical treatment of stakeholders.

Revising these bullets should provide a good understanding of Marketing Strategies for the Marketing Mix and Strategy part of Edexcel Business. Practice essay questions and case study based problems for better comprehension and application.