Discovering the real desires, wants, and needs of the customer and designing product mix to actually meet those needs requires detailed analysis of the target market and the resources available to the organization. Strategic Marketing is a catchall term that describes marketing activities based on carefully crafting a marketing plan. It often involves marketing outreach directed towards specific constituencies (Marketing Styles accessed on 12 August 2005).
The contribution of marketing in the organization lies in the formulation of strategies to choose the right customer, build relationships of trust with them and create a competitive advantage (Doyle 235). A marketing strategy consists of an internally integrated but externally focused set of choices about how the organization addresses its customers in the context of a competitive environment. A strategy has five elements: it deals with where the organization plans to be active; how it will get there; how it will succeed in the marketplace; what the speed and sequence of moves will be; and how the organization will obtain profits (Hambrick and Fredrickson 50).
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MikeBerman2a.CrystalMarket.CrystalCity.VA.18sep08Therefore, the challenge faced by the marketer is strategic marketing planning is to manage marketing complexity, meet the expectations of the customers and the stakeholders, while reconciling the variables of the external environment which influence the resource capabilities (1, ch01). Strategic marketing planning level consists of conducting a situation analysis, developing marketing objectives, determining the positioning of the product and the differential advantage in the market. The marketer then selects the target markets by measuring the market demand of the product. Once all the phases have been successfully completed, the designing and implementation of the strategic marketing mix takes place. (Etzel, Walter and Stanton 576; ch20)By performing the situation analysis the firm learns where its marketing program has been, how it has been doing, and what will it...