Formulating a Market Strategy
BY REX STEWART
#006 AUGUST - SEPTEMBER - 1986
In the previous article, we talked primarily about tools to determine your market niche and ways to utilize these tools in gathering information to determine your store's market position. With this information gathered, what do we do with it? On the board level, it should be utilized to formulate a strategic plan or to review an already existing plan. More importantly, on the staff level, the information gathered is the basis for an operational marketing strategy.
A marketing strategy should be used as a working paper that guides the store's operations for the next 1-2 years. The format of a marketing strategy has three sections: 1. basic assumptions -- based on survey results and past planning processes; 2. strategic goals -- goals for growth and fiscal health of the co-op; 3. achieving goals -- operational ideas for changes that will alter the perception of the storefront by the public to conform to the strategic goals.
(An advertising strategy, to be discussed in our next column, is a result of the marketing strategy and needs to be treated as a separate document. A market strategy creates the product to be advertised; the advertising strategy defines the markets to be advertised in and the media vehicles to be used.)
As mentioned earlier, it is important that corporate goals are established through a strategic planning process before an operational marketing strategy can be written. These corporate goals, along with gathered data, will form the basis of the strategy formulation. The first step is to analyze the corporate goals, asking three primary questions: 1) How do overall corporate goals relate to marketing? 2) Are the goals achievable through store operation? 3) Are the resources available -- both capital and personnel -- to achieve these goals?
If these questions