LO1 Describe the core values, mission, organizational culture, business, and goals of an organization.
Organizations exist to accomplish something for someone. To do this, they must establish a foundation, set a direction, and formulate strategies. To give organizations direction, focus, and inspiration, they continuously assess their core values, mission, organizational culture, business, and goals. Core values are the organization's fundamental, passionate, and enduring principles that guide its conduct over time. The organization's mission is a statement of its function in society, often identifying its customers, markets, products, and technologies. Organizational culture is a set of values, ideas, attitudes, and norms of behavior that is learned and shared among the members of an organization in order to connect with its stakeholders.

To answer the question, "What business are we in?" an organization must define its "business"—the clear, broad, underlying industry or market sector of an organization's offerings. Finally, the organization's goals (or objectives) are statements of an accomplishment of a task to be achieved, often by a specific time. Goals, such as profit, sales, market share, and customer satisfaction, convert an organization's mission and business into long- and short-term performance targets that measure how well it is doing.

LO2 Explain why managers use marketing dashboards and marketing metrics to evaluate a marketing program.
Marketing managers use marketing dashboards to visually display on a single computer screen the essential information to make a decision to take an action or further analyze a problem. This information consists of key performance measures of a product category, such as sales or market share, and is known as a marketing metric, which is a measure of the quantitative value or trend of a marketing activity or result. Most organizations tie their marketing metrics to the quantitative objectives established in their marketing plan, which is a road map for the marketing activities of an organization for a specified future time period, such as one year or five years.

LO3 Discuss how an organization assesses where it is now and seeks to be in the future.
Managers of an organization ask two key questions to set a strategic direction. The first question, "Where are we now?" requires an organization to (a) reevaluate its competencies to ensure that its special capabilities still provide a competitive advantage; (b) assess its present and prospective customers to ensure they have a satisfying customer experience—the central goal of marketing today; and (c) analyze its current and potential competitors from a global perspective to determine whether it needs to redefine its business.

The second question, "Where do we want to go?" requires an organization to set a specific direction and allocate resources to move it in that direction. Business portfolio and diversification analyses help an organization do this. Managers use business portfolio analysis to assess its strategic business units (SBUs), product lines, or individual products as though they were a collection of separate investments (cash cows, stars, question marks, and dogs) to determine the amount of cash each should receive. Diversification analysis is a tool that helps managers use one or a combination of four strategies to increase revenues: market penetration (selling more of an existing 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 products to new markets).

LO4 Explain the three steps of the planning phase of the strategic marketing process.
An organization uses the strategic marketing process to allocate its marketing mix resources to reach its target markets. This process is divided into three phases: planning, implementation, and evaluation. The planning phase consists of: (a) a situation (SWOT) analysis, which involves taking stock of where the firm or product has been recently, where it is now, and where it is headed. This assessment focuses on the organization's internal factors (strengths and weaknesses) and the external factors and trends affecting it (opportunities and threats); (b) a market-product focus through market segmentation—grouping buyers into segments with common needs and similar responses to marketing programs—and goal setting, which in part requires creating points of difference—those characteristics of a product that make it superior to competitive substitutes; and (c) a marketing program that specifies the budget and activities (marketing strategies and tactics) for each marketing mix element.

LO5 Describe the four components of the implementation phase of the strategic marketing process.
The implementation phase of the strategic marketing process carries out the marketing plan that emerges from the planning phase. It has four key elements: (a) obtaining resources; (b) designing the marketing organization to perform product management, marketing research, sales, and advertising and promotion activities; (c) developing schedules to identify the tasks that need to be done, the time that is allocated to each one, the people responsible for each task, and the deadlines for each task's accomplishment; and (d) executing the marketing strategies, which are the means by which marketing goals are to be achieved, and their associated marketing tactics, which are the detailed day-to-day operational decisions of a firm's marketing strategies. These are the marketing program actions a firm takes to achieve the goals set forth in its marketing plan.

LO6 Discuss the two aspects of the evaluation phase of the strategic marketing process.
The evaluation phase of the strategic marketing process seeks to keep the marketing program moving in the direction that was established in the marketing plan. This requires the marketing manager to compare the results from the marketing program with the marketing plan's goals to (a) identify deviations or "planning gaps" and (b) take corrective actions to exploit positive deviations or correct negative deviations.