Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory; tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat". Sun Tzu - The Art of War.
Marketing Strategy is something that helps companies achieves Marketing objectives. Marketing objectives help achieve corporate objectives and corporate objectives aim to achieve a competitive advantage over rival organizations.
Firstly, a Managing Director or senior management team, or executive board of directors (whoever is in charge) decides on overall corporate objectives. One corporate objective might be to increase sales by X%.
In order to achieve this objective the board might split it into smaller bite sized objectives, assigned to different departments. Marketing might get the following objective - Identify 2 new customer segments, or increase brand awareness by X%.
Do you see how business objectives filter down through the levels of organisation within a company?
Corporate objectives - corporate strategy - individual department objectives - departmental strategy - departmental tactics - departmental administration.
Marketing strategy is all about how to achieve Marketing objectives, Marketing tactics is how to implement strategies, and administration holds the whole thing together.
Referring back to Sun Tzu, the Art of War is an ancient Chinese text about military strategy, which in more recent years has become a common fixture on the desks of many business managers and it is packed full of military strategies both offensive and defensive. These strategies are as relevant to business today as they were to the Chinese military 1000 years ago. The first chapter of this book is about laying plans.
Planning and research are important elements to any kind of strategy, in fact without this research and planning strategy is worse than useless, it is misleading and dangerous to the organization's ability to