Creating Strategic and Operational Marketing Plans

Develop strategic and operational marketing plans by applying audit and analysis, planning, implementation, and control within the API Sea Planning Framework, covering macro, micro, task environments and Nike case study.

Explore how business orientations evolved from agriculture to the industrial revolution, tracing the emergence of production orientation alongside early marketing concepts in this introductory overview.

Explore the production orientation, where firms like Ford reduce costs and maximize availability through mass production, prioritizing internal operations over consumer needs, exemplified by the Model T.

Product orientation emphasizes best quality, performance, and innovations, but risks ignoring market demand. Coca-Cola missed coffee and juice markets and acquired Costa Coffee in 2013 for 3.9 billion.

Explores the selling orientation, where firms push products to customers with aggressive sales tactics, TV ads, and direct mails, while highlighting customer reviews and the customer's voice.

The marketing orientation, launched in 1950, shifts from selling products to meeting market needs, creating the right product for customers, and focusing on profitability.

Explore four orientations—product, production, sales, and marketing—and their assumptions. Identify that the best orientation depends on market status, with marketing orientation prioritizing customer needs and demand before creating products.

Investigate the scope of marketing part b by examining properties, organizations, persons, and ideas, including real estate, stocks and bonds, personal branding, and shaping demand and perception.

Marketing drives sales and provides insights into market opportunities and threats. It guides strategic objectives across existing, new, and diversified markets and builds loyalty through a consistent customer journey.

The marketing audit provides a comprehensive, independent, periodic review of a company’s environment, objectives, strategies, and activities to identify problems and opportunities and propose actions to improve performance.

Apply Porter’s five forces for a micro level audit, examining suppliers power, buyer power, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, and competitive rivalry, with examples from supermarkets and Coca-Cola.

Explore the hard elements of the 7S framework—strategy, structure, and systems—and show how management shapes them for competitive advantage; soft elements linked to culture will be covered in next lecture.

conduct an internal audit of the soft elements of the McKinsey 7S: shared values, style, staff, and skills, to show how culture, leadership, and competencies shape the internal environment.

Transition from theory to action by conducting a team-based market audit, using resource templates to structure findings from macro, micro, and internal analysis, and integrate into a SWOT framework.

Apply a market audit to your company via a Nike case study workshop, covering invites, agenda, and brainstorming. Build a strategic marketing plan through group activities, note-taking, and media documentation.

Facilitate a Nike case study workshop by mapping political, economic, and social factors within the PESTEL framework, collecting sticky-note insights on supply chains, tariffs, and market trends.

Explore Nike through a macro audit using the PESTEL framework, highlighting technology trends like VR product testing, online shopping, wearables, social media promotion, environmental factors, and IP and regulatory challenges.

Apply the Porter's five forces to Nike, assessing threats of entrants, suppliers, buyers, and substitutes, and conclude Nike's high brand loyalty and strong competitive position in the global market.

Analyze the data from macro, micro, and task environments through SWOT to map Nike's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Convert these insights into strategic marketing goals for future growth.

Explore how the planning stage transitions from strategic to operational marketing, and analyze segmentation, targeting, differentiation, and positioning with examples from the principles of marketing.

Explore the marketing mix as the set of controllable tactical tools firms blend to respond to their target market, known as the seven pieces of marketing.

Identify the five key product elements—product idea, branding, packaging, warranty, and product classes—and explore how branding and quality levels deliver customer satisfaction.

Explain packaging as the third product element—promotion, protection, and information—with eco-friendly labeling, then discuss warranty as the fourth element and the protected class as the fifth.

Explore how the marketing mix places products where target customers can be exposed effectively, using intensive, selective, or exclusive exposure and choosing direct or indirect channels to protect brand image.

Explore how Nike uses direct and indirect channels, outlets, wholesalers, retailers, and online platforms, to reach customers worldwide, grow online revenue, and strengthen brand control, pricing, and service.

Define price as the revenue-earning element of the marketing mix. Compare three strategies: cost-based pricing, value-based pricing, and competition-based pricing, and illustrate them with a retailer example.

Drive online competition and brand strategy with pricing; marketers sell value over price, as premium watches justify higher prices through craftsmanship, investment value, and emotional meaning.

Explore how process, people, and physical evidence extend the original four Ps of the marketing mix, highlighting standardized service delivery with examples like UPS.

Explore the corporate identity mix—communication, behavior, and ritualized elements like logos and spaces—and apply the seven S's framework to align strategy, structure, systems, and values for stakeholder trust.

Complete the planning stage by drafting a marketing strategic plan, share your work for feedback, view others' plans, and prepare to implement the marketing strategies in practice.

Marketing implementation turns plans into action assignments and ensures objectives are achieved, linking what and why of strategy with who, when, and how using macro, micro, and task environment data.

Link the operation plan to the strategic plan by outlining one-year initiatives for each goal. Define smart kpis to measure achievement over a five-year strategic horizon.

Identify the required financial and non-financial resources with the KPI owner, including internal training, software access, and cross-department support, and define the investment to ensure KPI achievement and assign ownership.

Analyze a real airline case study of the customer journey and touchpoints across physical and digital channels, illustrating how a single negative interaction can harm brand reputation.

Explore corporate identity through communication, behavior, and symbolism, applying the McKinsey 7S framework to align strategy, structure, systems and procedures, values, leadership, skills, and perception across stakeholders.

Develop marketing strategies and operational plans with clear KPIs, and access ongoing support through provided contact channels.