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 techniques like 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.

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 many market segments; a differentiation strategy, which requires products to have significant points of difference to charge a premium price while targeting many market segments; a cost focus strategy, which involves controlling costs to lower prices of products targeting only a few 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.
With the diversification analysis framework, a firm can seek increased revenues by using 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 products to new markets).
The synergy analysis framework focuses on 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. This results in five alternative combinations: market–product concentration, market specialization, product specialization, selective specialization, and full coverage.

LO3  Explain what makes an effective marketing plan.

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.

LO4  Use a Gantt Chart to schedule a series of tasks.

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.

First, marketing departments must distinguish between line positions, those individuals who have the authority and responsibility to issue orders to people that report to them 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 within a firm; geographical groupings, in which sales territories are subdivided on a geographical basis; and market-based groupings, which utilize specific customer segments.
Product managers interact with many 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 for which they are responsible.

LO6  Explain how marketing ROI, metrics, and dashboards relate to evaluating 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. The marketing manager then takes action to correct negative deviations from the plan and to exploit positive ones. Today, managers want an answer to the question "Are my marketing activities effective?" One answer is in using marketing ROI, which is the application of modern measurement technologies to understand, quantify, and optimize marketing spending. Identifying a marketing objective with a carefully defined marketing metric and tracking this metric on a marketing dashboard can improve marketing ROI.