Case Study on Marketing Strategic Plan (Case Study Sample)

Marketing Strategic Plan
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Introduction
The changing times have led to increase of use of digital technology. This has mostly affected how people communicate and interact. Communication is now mainly through social media, email and mobile telephony. This changing trend has highly affected the over 200 year old Australian Post whose core business over the years has been delivering letters for businesses and consumer market segments. Now the organization mails 97-percent of its letters from the government as most of the customers have moved to digital technology. Now the organization is recording great loses and needs a good marketing strategy that would make it to be still relevant in the market and make good profits.
Basing on the Australian Post situation, several marketing strategic plans can be used in solving the problem to put the organization back to its normal business operation. The marketing strategic plan may include, Marketing Mix, Segmentation, SWOT analysis, Porter’s five forces, Product life cycle, BCG Matrix, Ansoff Matrix, and scenario Building. Below is an analysis of how each of the marketing strategic plan could be used in solving the Australian Post scenario.
Marketing Mix
Marketing mix is the mixing of several ideas and plans and then followed by having a marketing representative who would promote the particular product or brand. The strategy involves combining several concepts and ideas to formulate a final strategy that will help in making the brand popular amongst the masses (Jain, 2001).
Elements of Marketing Mix
Marketing Mix is divided in four elements that are referred to as the four P’s of marketing. The four P's need to be understood and analyzed in trying to understand how marketing mix can be a strategic plan in solving a business's problem.
* Product
This is the goods and services that an organization offers to the market. It is necessary for the organization to understand the product in relation to the customers. The organization should understand the needs the customer who wants satisfied by the product. The business should be understand the particular features in the product that satisfy the customers’ needs. The product feature in the product or service that satisfies the customers’ needs should then be made in the specifications of how the customers love it.
* Place
Place is the actual; place where the products are found and can be sold and acquired by the end users of the product or service. Buyers can buy products either from virtual markets or from physical markets. In virtual market the buyers do not interact with the sellers while in the physical markets the two meets. The business has to understand where the buyers look to buy their products. They should then align the product to be available at the place where the customers want them.
* Price
This is the actual amount of money that is paid for by the customers to acquire a specific product or service. It is important in understanding how the customers value the product. Understanding how the customers would relate to any increase or decrease in the price of the product is also important. The business has then to come up with a price that is suitable for the customer and still makes good profit for the business. Coming up with discounts to customers would depend on how well the price is understood in relation to the customer. And the price has to be analyzed with how it compares to the competitors’ prices (Jain, 2001).
* Promotion
These are the ideas and strategies that are implemented by the marketers so that the customers can be aware of brand. It aims at making the product or brand popular amongst the masses. Promotion may be through advertising or personal selling. The business needs to understand when and where it can get messages of the brand to the customers (Jain, 2001). Understanding of the competitors’ way of advertising is also important.
Using this marketing strategic plan the Australian Post can be able to come up with a new way in which they will serve the market. This is by coming up with services that are more appealing to the customers and they will be able to know when and how they need to offer the services as well as how to advertise and promote their services. The Australian Post will as well be able to know the pricing that would attract customers.
Marketing Segmentation
Segmentation is the process where you define and subdivide a large homogenous market to achieve a homogeneous market that has clearly identifiable segments that have similar needs, wants and demand characteristics. It aims at designing a marketing mix that will precisely meet the expectations of the customers in the segment that is targeted (O'Cass, 2003). Marketing segmentation contains four factors that need to be achieved the organization.
* Having a clear identification of the segment
* Understanding measurability of the effective size of the segment
* Understanding how accessible the segment is through promotional efforts
* The segment’s appropriateness to the resources and policies of the company.
Marketing segmentation is based on four strategies that are behavioral, demographic, psychographic, behavioral, demographic and geographical differences (O'Cass, 2003). This particular strategic plan can be used in the Australian Post situation in segmenting some of its services so that it can particularly give the customers their expectations.
SWOT Analysis
SWOT analysis is the third Marketing Strategic Plan that can be applied. SWOT analysis is useful in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the business and identifying both the Opportunities that may be open for the business and the threats the business faces. SWOT analysis is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
In this strategy the business needs to come up with its strengths in the market and analyze them. Then the business should come up with the business's weaknesses, this weakness should be compared to the strengths to come up with a way forward. The business analyzes the market to find any opportunities of new market or gap, this makes it easy for the business to expand or introduce a new product. Lastly, the business looks at the threats that are in the market. It is important for the business to understand the threats in the market to be able deal with them without making the business to fail.
Continuing businesses uses SWOT analysis to react to the changing environment and to be able to respond proactively. New business use the SWOT analysis in their planning process to enter the market.
The Australian post being a business that has been in operation for more than two hundred years should analyze its strengths and weakness as well as the many threats it is facing and be able to identify any of the opportunities in the market so that it can be able to solve the challenges it is facing.
Porter’s five forces
Porter's five forces is also a tool that can be used as a marketing strategic plan. It is a simple but a powerful tool that understands where power lies in a business. This element is important as it helps in understanding both the strength of the current competition position and the strength of the competition the business is considering to move into. Understanding where power lies in the business is important as it helps the business take advantage of situations of strength, improve situations of weakness, and avoiding taking wrong steps (Galbreath, 2004).
The tool has the five forces that determine competitive power of a business:
* Supplier Power.
The business needs to analyze how easy it is for their supplier to drive up prices. This force is driven by the size of suppliers dealing with each key input, their strength and control over the business, their product service, and the cost of switching from one supplier to the other and many more. The business having fewer suppliers and more need for supplier’s help makes the suppliers more powerful to the business.
* Buyer Power
This is understanding how easy it may be for the buyers to drive the prices down. It is also dri...