A marketing STRATEGY is a systematic plan for achieving sales and branding objectives. TACTICS, then, are the actions you'll take and the tools you'll use to accomplish your strategy.
Although we've heard smaller businesses complain that the word "strategy" is "overused marketing talkspeak," strategic planning is a vital prequel to your campaigns. It helps you concentrate your [limited] resources on the best opportunities for increased sales and competitive advantage.
To these ends, big companies favor marketing by strategic models, e.g. 3Cs, 4Ps, 3Vs, STP, SWOT, yadda yadda. Yet while the models hold enduring value, real-life business issues (time constraints, tight resources, incomplete data, competitor attacks) don't often allow for planning-by-textbook.
We maintain that effective marketers (like The Guru)
rely on experience, intelligence, customer knowledge and common sense. Academics typically dismiss this as gut-reaction marketing, yet countless successful strategies have been born of instinct rather than classic techniques.
Indeed, The Guru asserts that the most successful businesses analyze situations and explore possible strategies through the eyes of their average customers. |
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