LO1  Explain how marketing managers allocate their limited resources.

Marketing managers use the strategic marketing process and marketing information, such as marketing plans, sales reports, and action memos, to effectively allocate their scarce resources to exploit the competitive advantages of their products. Marketers may use either sales response functions or market share (share point) analysis to help them assess what the market's response will be to additional marketing efforts.

LO2  Describe three marketing planning frameworks: Porter's generic business strategies, diversification analysis, and synergy analysis.

Three useful frameworks to improve marketing planning are: (a)Porter's generic business strategies; (b)profit enhancement options; and (c) market-product synergies. Porter identifies four generic business strategies that firms can adopt: a cost leadership strategy, which focuses on reducing expenses to lower product prices while targeting a broad array of market segments; a differentiation strategy, which requires products to have significant points of difference to charge a premium price while targeting a broad array of market segments; a cost focus strategy, which involves controlling costs to lower prices of products targeted at a narrow range of market segments; and a differentiation focus strategy, which requires products to have significant points of difference to reach one or only a few market segments.
A second marketing planning framework is to use profit enchancement options to increase sales revenue, decrease costs, or both. To increase revenues, marketers can use one or a combination of four strategies to focus on present or new products or markets: market penetration (selling more of a product to existing markets); market development (selling an existing product to new markets); product development (selling a new product to existing markets); and diversification (selling new product to new markets). To reduce expenses, marketers can (a)generate additional economics of scale in marketing and production costs and (b)reduce personnel and other nonmarketing costs, product rejects through improved quality, and so forth.
The third framework is to use a market-product grid that results in two kinds of synergies: marketing synergies (efficiencies), which run horizontally across the row of the various products offered by the firm to a single market segment; and R&D–manufacturing synergies (efficiencies), which run vertically down a column of the various market segments targeted for a given product or product class. The interactions or synergy effects of these marketing and production efficiencies result in five alternative combinations: market–product concentration, market specialization, product specialization, selective specialization, and full coverage.

LO3  Explain what makes an effective marketing plan and some problems that often exist with it.

An effective marketing plan has: measurable, achievable goals; uses facts and valid assumptions; is simple, clear, and specific; is complete and feasible; and is controllable and flexible. Some problems that arise with marketing plans are that marketers: (a)base them on poor assumptions about the marketing environment;(b)lose sight of their customers' needs; (c)spend too much time and effort on data collection for and writing the actual plan; and(d)do not seek ownership of the plan by operating managers and others charged with its implementation.

LO4  Schedule a series of tasks to meet a deadline using a Gantt chart.

Successful implementation of a marketing plan requires that people know the tasks, responsibilities, and deadlines needed to complete it. Once the information for these three areas is generated, a program schedule can be developed. A Gantt chart is a graphical representation of this schedule. The key to this scheduling technique is to identify those tasks that must be done sequentially from those that can be done concurrently.

LO5  Describe the alternatives for organizing a marketing department and the role of a product manager.

A marketing department must be organized to effectively implement a marketing plan. First, marketing organizations must distinguish between line positions, those individuals in the marketing organization who have the authority and responsibility to issue orders to people that report to them to carry out a particular aspect of the marketing plan, and staff positions, those individuals who have the authority and responsibility to advise but not directly order people in line positions to do something.
Second, marketing organizations use one of four divisional groupings to implement marketing plans: product line groupings, responsible for specific product offerings; functional groupings that represent the different departments and business activities (marketing, manufacturing, finance, etc) within a firm; geographical groupings, in which sales territories are subdivided according to geographical location; and market-based groupings, which utilize specific customer segments.
The role of the product manager is to interact with numerous people and groups both inside and outside the firm to coordinate the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the marketing plan and its budget on an annual and long-term basis for the products responsible.

LO6  Explain how sales and profitability analyses and ROI marketing are used to evaluate marketing programs.

The evaluation phase of the strategic marketing process involves measuring the results of the actions from the implementation phase and comparing them with goals set in the planning phase. TSales analysis uses the firm's sales records to compare actual sales with sales objectives. Profitability analysis uses the profit attributable to the firm's products, customer groups, sales territories, distribution channels, and promotions. A specific kind of profitability analysis is ROI marketing, which is the application of modern measurement technologies and contemporary organizational design to understand, quantify, and optimize marketing spending.