Strategic Marketing Analysis Reflection Essay (Essay Sample)

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Strategic marketing Analysis reflection
Introduction
Marketing is described as the procedure of creating, conveying, disseminating, and creating real worth solutions for customers and clients. .Marketing entails more than simply informing prospective and existing customers about your products and why they should purchase them. Marketing is therefore a broad term that refers to many aspects of a company. In business, various aspects such as customer, brand, supply, price, integrated marketing communications, and service must be addressed in order to have a successful marketing strategy. This essay is a personal reflection on what I learnt in my strategic marketing class, the skills I gained and how it will contribute to my future career. This essay is a demonstration of my self-reflection ability to learn through self-reflection and truthful and critical self-awareness about my understanding of the course.
Before taking this course, my knowledge on marketing and marketing strategies was very limited. I used to think that marketing was all about promoting a product either through advertising or other marketing channels. I was looking forward to learning marketing since I see it as a chance to better prepare myself for my future professor. I expected to gain knowledge marketing principles and components like promotion, positioning, and branding. Because marketing concepts are always changing, I planned to master a wide range of personal and professional abilities necessary to develop a strategic marketing plan that would assure the business or organization's existence. On taking this class, I can confidently say that my understanding has grown to the point where I became familiar with a range of new issue of marketing management and the marketing methods in particular that were generated from the product and branding strategy. Throughout my lectures, my problem-solving skills, organization skills, presentation skills, coordination skills, and other abilities were developed.
Strategic Marketing Reflection
One of the interesting areas I covered in the module was on customer focus. Customer focus is a corporate strategy that prioritizes customers in decision-making. Instead of focusing just on earnings, customer-focused firms make decisions based on how those actions affect customers. A business that is customer-focused is able to cultivate loyalty and trust among its customers. What intrigued me regarding customer focus is the 4C’s of customer focus. That is Coordination which refers to the Customer-related information, division of labor, and decision-making must be able to flow freely across functional boundaries; cooperation which is the creation of a culture of customer-focused cooperation, use substance and symbols; capability which means having broad knowledge of a variety of goods and client needs, as well as the ability to work across corporate boundaries and connection which means improving your relationships with external partners to deliver more value at a reduced cost. This was an entirely new concept to me because prior to this; I did not realize the extent of benefits and competitive advantage that customer focus presents o the business.
I understood during the class about the marketing mix that businesses use to produce a desired response from its target market. An organizations offerings must be unique from competitors and must meet the needs of the clients in its target markets. Therefore, in marketing, an organizations need to understand the customer experience and how to measure the customer value, so that they can know what and when to adjust. Thus the customer pyramid which is quite effective in not only improving individual touch points but streamlining the entire Customer Journeys is used by businesses to assess the customer experience. The Customer Pyramid is a method that allows a company to manage for greater customer profitability by utilizing variances in customer profitability. This tool can help businesses strengthen the business service quality and overall profitability, as well as discover the best way to allocate precious resources.
The class also helped me start to appreciate the importance of market segmentation. From what I learnt, I could tell that the current global markets are dynamic and complex, so it is important that companies proactively attract customers through market segmentation. Normally, markets are segmented by lifestyle, demographically, geographically, psychographically or geodemographicaly. Through segmentation, customers are divided based on the value they derive from products or services. Customers make decisions based on how well the said goods meet their needs. Market segmentation helps the marketer identify these needs and demands and market to them directly, avoiding the waste of message. Market segmentation allows you thousands of methods to ensure your customers see you as precisely what they want, and exactly what they need, whether it's advising new drivers about the best auto insurance for them or sharing discounts on barbeques and sun-chairs with people living in the middle of a heat wave. Therefore, if I am ever to start a business in start in future I will be very keen on the market segmentation so that I can be able to identify the right market for your products and then target your marketing more effectively. 
Moreover, I was surprised to realize that positioning is very vital in marketing. In order to build an international marketing strategy, product positioning is crucial. Marketers must once again make the difficult decision of how much to differentiate between distinct markets. A single positioning strategy helps a corporation to benefit from global branding, marketing, packaging, and a consistent international image where tastes and preferences are largely uniform throughout. A logo’s function represents its place among its competition in the mental maps that customers construct to symbolize the range of feasible solutions to their needs. Strong brand positions are effective because they permit clients to categorize brands based totally on their resemblance while also distinguishing and contrasting them based on their differences.
I also came to the realization that strategic marketing should also involve drawing in new clients. Attracting customers may not be easy but in the current global dynamic environment which requires improving customer experience and satisfaction in the organization. One approach to do so is to provide the highest possible level of service. Customers' overall assessments of service quality have been conceived as service quality. Customers use it as a significant decision criterion when evaluating services (Ganguli and Kumar Roy, 2010).Understanding and responding to customer expectations is critical to providing exceptional service. Customers judge the quality of a company's service provision by comparing perceptions to expectations. Various disparities influence customers' perceived quality, resulting in service quality inadequacies, and that the customers perception of quality is a product of the gap between customers' desires/expectations and their perceptions of the actual service received.
Branding is important because it not only leaves a lasting impact on clients, but it also tells them what to anticipate from your company. Is global branding of a product or service appropriate in all case scenarios?  Should it be different in different parts of the world? One obvious benefit of global branding is economies of scale, as research and promotion costs can be spread out over a larger volume of product. Companies can also benefit from increased brand awareness without having to retrain for diverse markets. An example of branding that we learnt in the module that I could relate to well is the evolution of the Starbucks logo. Besides preparing the best coffee in the food industry, I that that Starbucks strategic marketing is very impressive. When I look at a company such as Starbucks, The Starbucks product line has logo and unique design that always piques the interests of its customers. This iconic emblem is one of the most well-known corporate logo designs, beloved by Starbucks customers all over the world; I included. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to state that the Starbucks logo design's original concept has played a significant role in the company's global success. The design of the Starbucks logo demonstrates how its originality and uniqueness have helped it to stand the test of time and become one of the world's most well-known landmarks. It is not by accident that each product from Starbucks has their unique design of their logo. The product line from the Water, skateboard to apparel each have a distinct logo such that Starbucks is no longer just a coffee company, and other items can now be developed under the new brand mark.
After every topic in the module, the professor would present to us various case studies involving “real-life” issues of strategic marketing that were part of the module. To be honest, at the start of the module I