Sbu - Strategy Development and Marketing Planning

Chapter 2: Strategy Development and Marketing Planning 

1. Understand why a sound marketing strategy is essential for any company

Corporate Strategy (Concerned with parent company)/(Business strategy) Comprised of various Strategic Business Units  (SBUs). Each SBUs (can vary from a single product line or production facility to one or more divisions, or even a whole market) is a division of the organization that operates more or less independently; it sells a range of products to a certain group of customers and – among clearly defined competitors – is responsible for the development and implementation of the strategy.

Example: At Philips, the SBUs are based on product-market combinations. This reflects the market-oriented approach of the head office in Amsterdam

Business Strategy (the division or SBU) the divisions, subsidiaries or SBUs of the corporation conduct the second level of planning. The chief executive officer or CEO of such an operational unit develops a business strategy. The CEO also distributes the resources – money, manpower and production capacity – made available to the SBU among its various activities (the product lines or brand) in a way that will achieve the best results. Strategy development starts with the strategic profile. This can be established in a brief description of the company, its products and the markets in which it operates, including the market of suppliers, the financial market, the labour market & the customers.

Marketing Strategy: (For a product line or brand) usually called marketing planning. Marketing planning is the marketing managers' or product managers' responsibility. They develop a product-, price-, and promotion- and distribution strategy in order to achieve the objectives of their product-market combination. With this goal in mind, they analyze information about the size of the market, their target markets and the profit contribution per product. In this sense, marketing and product managers are concerned with both strategic and operational management tasks. Thus, in many organizations they are part of middle management. The information they include in the individual marketing plans is ultimately integrated into the corporate marketing plan.

Managers are basically concerned with four things:

1. the analysis
2. planning
3. implementation
4. control of the company's activities

1. Explain what information a mission statement should include

1. What I sis our business?
2. Who our customers?
3. What do customers value?
4. What should our business be?

Spells out the company’s strategy vision includes Co. philosophy overall goals, top managements value & priorities & strategies it pursues.

1. Conduct a SWOT analysis for an organization

• Internal—Controllable factors         Strengths’, Weakness, Opportunity & Threats.