Strategic Marketing is about aligning the whole business to the changing needs of carefully chosen customers.
“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 promotional activities but asking the serious and difficult questions, such as these:
- ‘What business should we be in?’
- ‘What do customers really want?‘
- ‘What can we excel at in a competitive marketplace?‘
- Which customers should we decide strategically NOT to serve?
- What is our Unique Business Formula?
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 business and its products around the needs of selected customers (instead of trying to shape the customer to fit the enterprise’s products and services.)
“To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business”.
– Peter Drucker
Strategic marketing embraces the whole business, its core competencies, its competitive advantage, its structure, its goals and its values.
It’s crucial that you deal first with the big issues of strategic marketing before dealing with the details of operational marketing (marketing communications).
David is the author of the marketing eBook, Audiobook and paperback: ‘Chase One Rabbit: Strategic Marketing for Business Success. 63 Tips, Techniques and Tales for Creative Entrepreneurs’. This offers ‘Marketing in Minutes on your Mobile’ in the form of short, informative and inspiring techniques that you can use immediately to make your business even more successful.
David Parrish is an international expert on strategic marketing and the author of two book on marketing and business strategy. He is a marketing consultant, trainer and keynote speaker on creative entrepreneurship and strategic marketing at conferences and events world-wide.
This short blog is based on a marketing chapter in David’s book ‘T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity’, which can be downloaded as a free eBook in various formats or purchased as a full-colour paperback from Amazon and elsewhere.
Download the marketing chapter from ‘T-Shirts and Suits: A Guide to the Business of Creativity’ (PDF, 92KB)
Download the_magic_of_marketing. Excerpt from T-Shirts and Suits. A Guide to the Business of Creativity.pdf
