Strategic Marketing
Strategic Marketing is about Aligning the Whole Business to Customers' Changing Needs.
"Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialised activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer's point of view."
- Peter Drucker.
The term 'Marketing' is widely misunderstood. Many people think of marketing simply as advertising and promotion. This is merely one aspect of marketing, ie 'operational marketing' or 'marketing communications'.
At a much more fundamental level, Marketing is about aligning your whole business or organisation to the needs of customers.
'Strategic Marketing' is not about producing brochures but asking the serious and difficult questions, such as 'What business should we be in?'; 'What do customers really want?'; and 'What can we excel at in a competitive marketplace?'
As David Packard of Hewlett Packard said: "Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department."
In short, Strategic Marketing requires a complete change of thinking, from:
'How can we sell what we want to produce?' to
'How can we use our skills to produce what the market wants?'
This requires both an accurate understanding of market needs, and a willingness to shape the organisation and its products around customer needs (instead of trying to shape the customer to fit the organisation's products and services.)
"To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business".
- Peter Drucker
Strategic marketing embraces the whole organisation, its core competencies, its structure, its goals and its values.
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