Marketing Planning: Strategic, Tactical, and Marketing Plans

Study Notes

Strategic planning outlines the organization's game plan for success, providing a roadmap for reaching business goals and objectives.
Tactical planning focuses on specific markets or market segments, developing marketing programs that meet their needs.
A marketing plan combines product, pricing, distribution, and promotion decisions to create an attractive offering, addressing implementation, control, and refinement.

Situation Analysis: collecting and interpreting internal, competitive, and environmental information.
Competitive Intelligence: analyzing competing businesses' capabilities, vulnerabilities, and intentions.
Environmental Scanning: analyzing external economic, political, legal, technological, and cultural events and trends that may affect the organization's marketing efforts.
Internal Analysis: objectively reviewing internal information on the firm's current strategy, performance, and sustainability strategies, as well as current and future resource availability.

Branding involves understanding how marketing program elements work together to create the brand, including product, price, availability, and image/reputation.
Product positioning establishes a mental image of the product in the minds of target buyers, distinguishing or differentiating the offering from competitors.

Marketing implementation: executing the "how" of the marketing plan, involving the 5th P: people.
Control: ensuring the strategy stays on course, achieving its goals and objectives.

Product: creating a link between product benefits and customer needs.
Price: pricing decisions, leading to revenue and profit, directly connected to customer demand, easy to change, and a major quality cue for customers.
Place: distribution and supply chain management, aiming to get the product to the right place, at the right time, in the right quantities, at the lowest possible cost.
Promotion: Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC), coordinating all promotional activities to produce a unified, customer-focused message.