Not all customers are good customers! Strategic marketing is about carefully selecting the right kind of customers, not trying to sell to everyone. This section tells you how to select the right target market(s).

Being authentic in business means being yourself and being ‘in your element’. Strategic marketing is about finding customers who are on your wavelength – then selling to them is easy and natural, not a painful process.

Strategic marketing is about the business as a whole and its design and development around the changing needs of selected customers. It is not a separate department or final stage in the process.

Strategic marketing is about the ‘big picture’ questions: Is there a sufficiently large market for your product? Why aren’t competitors serving a market? What are the habits and preferences of your target customers?

My approach to marketing makes a clear distinction between strategic marketing and operational marketing (operational marketing is also sometimes called marketing communications or ‘marketing comms’). This difference is crucial. And strategic marketing must come first.

Many of the biggest problems in business can be ascribed to mistakes in strategic marketing. Don’t blame the operational marketing people if your product doesn’t sell. Instead you may need to look towards the people who make strategic marketing errors (even if they don’t call what they do ‘marketing’). Strategic marketing means connecting the right products to the right customers.

Who’s right and who’s wrong? In my view, such battles are the result of a failure of top management. Because it is the people at the top making strategic decisions that need to square the circle. Business strategy is all about harmonising what can feasibly be produced profitably and the exact markets to be served.

A welcome and introduction to the course, with information about its structure, and how to get the most from the course.

An imposed increase in prices would mean losing some customers – but only those who can go to cheaper rivals. We need to focus our business on things we can do that rivals can’t, which enables us to increase prices – with the right kind of customers.

Once we understand how valuable the benefits of our products are to the customer, we can price accordingly.