The Strategic Marketing Process

Strategic Marketing Process (SMP) is an integrated approach to developing market strategy and action plans to create, deliver, and capture superior customer value.

Thus, marketing plan happens at the level of business unit, production and the market. Therefore, in order to be successful, the company has to execute its tasks better than its competitor to satisfy the demands of target users.

1. Find a need and Conduct research

• A thorough analysis of the situation in which the firm finds it serves as the basis for identifying opportunities to satisfy unfulfilled customer needs. In addition to identifying the customer needs, the firm must understand its own capabilities and the environment in which it is operating.

• The situation analysis thus can be viewed in terms an analysis of the external environment and an internal analysis of the firm itself. The external environment can be described in terms of macro-environmental factors that broadly affect many firms, and micro-environmental factors closely related to the specific situation of the firm.

• The situation analysis should include past, present, and future aspects. It should include a history outlining how the situation evolved to its present state and an analysis of trends in order to forecast where it is going. Good forecasting can reduce the chance of spending a year bringing a product to market only to find that the need no longer exists.

• If the situation analysis reveals gaps between what consumers want and what currently is offered to them, then there may be opportunities to introduce products to better satisfy those consumers. Hence, the situation analysis should yield a summary of problems and opportunities. From this summary, the firm can match its own capabilities with the opportunities in order to satisfy customer needs better than the competition.

2. Design a product to meet the need based on research

• Once the best opportunity to satisfy unfulfilled customer needs is identified, a strategic plan for pursuing the opportunity can be developed. Market research will provide specific market information that will permit the firm to select the target market segment and optimally position the offering within that segment. The result is a value proposition to the target market.

• After several months in operation, the company had conducted a research to evaluate and improve the quality of our product.
  
  

3. Do product testing

• Product testing is to help the company to know the customers’ feedback about the product. In the beginning, maybe our products received cold reception from the consumers because they were long accustomed to beverages such as fruits juice and carbonated drinks., but don't give up to introducing our products by branding them as “must try” products.
  
  

4. Determine a brand name, design a package, and set a price

• Choose a brand name, design a package and price for our product. Make sure our chosen suitable with the quality of our product.
  
  

5. Select a distribution system

• During the beginning of our operation, we plan to distribute our product by selling it by ourselves. This is because the company is not having enough workers to distribute the product. But after we had promoted this product and with the increasing of our customer, we had selected a direct selling distribution system.

• It was a very hard situation when there were customers that not allowed us to come and promote our product. But sometimes we had a very warm welcome by the customers especially when we explain the benefits of our products.
  
  

6. Design a promotional programme

• To promote our product to public, we had designed a lot of promotional programme and of course with the help of the marketing agency.
  

• We also advertise to individuals or companies who has interest in participating in the business we run.

• Apart from that, we also had interviews with our customers who tried our products continuously for one month.
  

7. Build a relationship with customer

• In order to market our product to all over country, we have planned to bottle it and yet retaining the natural goodness of the product. We have also planned to use land transportation to distribute our products, and as the company’s financial structure become stronger, distribution via sea and air will be viable options.

As a conclusion, most companies operate without formal planning due to inhibitions such as hectic schedule and no time. Strategic planning encourages systematic forward thinking management. This enables a company to improve its objective and policy, which lead to better coordination towards the company efforts, and provides clearer performance standard for control purpose. Concise planning helps the company to forecast and act quickly and appropriately to any change in environment, and better equipped to face any possibilities.

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