Marketing Strategy Components: Audits to Control

Posted on Jan 12, 2026 in Marketing

C2: Marketing Audits

Internal Audit

Examine resources and capabilities, current offerings, past results, business relationships, and key issues that affect marketing and performance.

External Audit

Assess PESTLE factors, competitive factors, differentiation (product, service, brand image), cost (unit, transaction, marketing expenses), and marketing advantage (market share, brand awareness, distribution).

C3: Consumer and Business Markets

Market Definitions:

  • Potential Market: All customers who may need, want, or be interested in the good or service.
  • Available Market: Customers interested, having both adequate income and access to the product.
  • Qualified Available Market: Customers qualified to buy based on product-specific criteria (e.g., age).
  • Target Market: The segment the organization decides to serve.
  • Penetrated Market: Customers in the target market who currently buy or have bought the specific product type.

When planning for consumer markets, consider needs stemming from characteristics such as age, national or regional culture, subculture, social connections (including reference groups and opinion leaders), and personal/psychological elements.

Main Influences on Business Markets:

  1. Characteristics: Industry classification, turnover, workforce size, facilities location, geographic focus, customer-perceived value.
  2. Organizational and Environmental Considerations: Objectives, budgets and buying cycle, buying policies and procedures, share and growth, competitive situation.
  3. Internal/External Relationships: Buying center participants, decision process, supplier relations, customer relations.

C4: Market Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning

Segmentation Bases

Markets can be segmented using various bases:

  • Demographic: Age, family size, marital status, gender.
  • Socioeconomic: Income, class, education, religion, ethnicity.
  • Geographic: Global, hemispheric, national, state, city, postal code, climate, rural vs. urban.
  • Lifestyle/Personality: Attitudes/opinions, interests, tastes, and preferences.

Segment Ranking Criteria

Rank segments for marketing attention based on:

  • Fit with the firm’s goals, strengths, resources, and core competencies.
  • Competitive advantages.
  • Advantageous pricing or supply costs due to the relative power of buyers or suppliers.
  • Sizeable profit and growth potential.
  • Ecological impact.
  • Significant potential for building long-term customer relationships.

Targeting Strategies

  1. Undifferentiated: Targeting the entire market with the same marketing mix, ignoring segment differences.
  2. Differentiated: Formulating a separate marketing mix for two or more chosen segments.
  3. Concentrated: Targeting one segment with one marketing mix to compete more effectively by satisfying one sizeable set of customers.

Positioning

Consider these questions for effective positioning:

  • What specific points of differentiation are meaningful to your customers and applicable to your brand or product?
  • How can you use differentiation to position your offer as competitively distinctive, desirable, and superior?
  • What changes in customers’ needs, competitive pressures, or the marketing environment might cause you to undertake repositioning?

C5: Growth Strategies

Strategies for expanding market presence:

  • Market Penetration: Offer existing products to customers in existing markets to increase sales and reinforce brand strength.
  • Product Development: Market new products or product variations to customers in existing markets.
  • Market Development: Pursue growth by marketing existing products in new markets and segments, expanding the customer base geographically or by segment.
  • Diversification: (1) Distributing new products in new markets through existing channel arrangements; (2) Initiating new marketing activities in new markets; or (3) Acquiring companies to gain access to new products and new markets.

Product Mix and Line Management

Decisions involve changing product line length or depth, product mix width, considering the cannibalization effect, and utilizing limited-time and limited-edition products.

Product Life Cycle Management

Key actions include locating the product in its cycle by segment and market, managing progression through the cycle, and balancing the life cycles of multiple products.

New Product Development

Focus areas are adding new product categories, expanding existing lines or brands, managing the development process steps, and addressing sustainability and ethical concerns.

C6: Product Planning Details

Planning for products involves decisions about the product mix (assortment of product lines), product line length (number of items in each line), and product line depth (number of product variations within a line).

The Product Life Cycle (PLC) describes a product’s market movement from introduction through growth, maturity, and decline.

New Product Development Steps

In new product development, the process includes:

  1. Generate ideas.
  2. Screen ideas.
  3. Research customer reaction.
  4. Develop the marketing strategy.
  5. Analyse the business case.
  6. Develop the product to determine practicality.
  7. Test market the product.
  8. Commercialise it.

C7: Pricing Decisions

Customers perceive a product’s value based on total benefits weighed against total costs, in the context of competitive products and prices. Marketers should research perceived value to plan price, cost, and product decisions.

Influences on Pricing

  • Internal Influences: Organisational and marketing plan objectives; costs; targeting and positioning; product decisions and life cycle; and other marketing-mix decisions.
  • External Influences: Customers; market and demand; competition; channel members; and legal, regulatory, ethical, and sustainability considerations.

New Product Pricing Approaches

Two primary approaches for new products are:

  • Market-Penetration Pricing: To capture market share quickly.
  • Market-Skimming Pricing: To skim maximum revenues from each market layer.

Price Adaptation

Marketers can adapt prices using discounts, allowances, extra value, periodic mark-downs, or segmented pricing, depending on local laws and the marketing plan. Prices may also vary according to dynamic pricing, negotiated pricing, or auction pricing.

C8: Distribution and Value Chain

Value Chain

The value chain is the succession of interrelated, value-added functions undertaken by the marketer with suppliers and wholesalers to deliver a product that fulfills customer needs.

Marketing Channels

Marketers can use direct channels or indirect channels, which work through other businesses or individuals. Intermediaries include wholesalers, retailers, representatives, brokers, and agents.

In a channel with one or more levels, marketers can choose exclusive, selective, or intensive distribution.

Logistics Functions

The main functions involved in logistics are pre- and post-production inventory, storage, transportation, order processing, and fulfilment. Increasing customer service levels generally increases logistics costs, while reducing logistics costs generally reduces the level of customer service.

C9: Marketing Communications and Influence

Strategies for marketing communications (promotion) help engage and influence the thoughts, feelings, and behaviour of audiences important to the brand. Word-of-mouth and buzz marketing are key influence strategies.

Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)

IMC ensures that the content and delivery of all marketing messages across all media are coordinated and consistent, supporting the product, brand, or organization’s positioning and objectives.

Communication Tools

Tools include advertising, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, and personal selling.

Communications Planning Steps

  1. Define the target audience.
  2. Set objectives and budget.
  3. Consider relevant legal, regulatory, social, and ethical issues.
  4. Select and plan for the use of specific tools, messages, and media.
  5. Plan pre- and post-implementation analysis.
  6. Schedule, implement, and evaluate the campaign.

When planning advertising, consider message appeal, creativity, appropriateness for media, and balancing reach and frequency within the budget. Use sales promotion to stimulate faster response by adding value or reducing perceived cost. If personal selling is appropriate, consider in-person sales, Internet sales, or telemarketing. Use direct marketing cost-effectively to build targeted relationships with measurable responses. Plan public relations to foster positive attitudes and ongoing dialogue with key publics.

C10: Digital Marketing

Digital marketing describes any marketing use of online communications and e-commerce sites, including social media and mobile marketing, to reach target audiences.

Digital Advertising Types

Digital advertising includes:

  1. Paid search ads.
  2. Display, banner, and pop-up ads.
  3. TV adverts posted online.

A challenge is the increased use of ad blockers. Websites should be optimized to appear in search results and function properly on different devices.

C11: Customer Service and Internal Marketing

Customer service supports external marketing efforts and must, in turn, be supported by internal marketing focusing on internal people and processes. Customer service helps attract and retain customers, build brand image for differentiation, and achieve objectives.

Internal Marketing Benefits

Internal marketing helps the organization focus on customers, increase employee knowledge, encourage internal cooperation and commitment to marketing, and boost pride in performance for competitive strength.

Service Decisions

Marketers face decisions about:

  • Process: The experience customers have when arranging for service.
  • Outcomes: Delivering service on time, as promised, and to customer satisfaction.

They must also decide the appropriate service level to promise, delivery before/during/after purchase, monitoring customer comments, and the process for recovering from service lapses.

Planning for internal marketing is essential to promote the brand and its values inside the organization and keep employees informed about marketing activities.

C12: Measuring Progress and Control

This stage involves preparing to measure progress and performance.

Performance Measurement Tools

  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Indicators vital to effective performance, defined by strategic goals and marketing plan objectives.
  • Metrics: Used to measure performance-related activities and outcomes numerically and regularly.
  • Forecasts: Project sales and costs for the marketing plan period so management can compare actual results and identify deviations.

Budgeting and Scheduling

Budgets may be developed using floor-up, top-down, or combined methods. Marketers use schedules to define the timing of tasks and implement specific programmes and activities.

Marketing Control

Marketing control (Stage 7 of planning) consists of:

  1. Setting standards and measurement intervals.
  2. Measuring interim results after implementation.
  3. Comparing measured results with standards.
  4. Diagnosing any deviations.
  5. Taking action as needed.

Contingency plans help an organization prepare to respond to potentially disruptive elements. Scenario planning looks beyond historical trends to envision broad, long-term environmental changes that could significantly alter future performance.