Marketing Strategies Workshop 12 Dec 2011

It was an engaging marketing strategies workshop that I have conducted today for a SME that has presence in Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Iran, and Indonesia beyond Singapore. The workshop comprised of 17 participants mostly managers, general managers of each respective countries, and CEO. With majority of participants from senior management level, there were positive arguments of concerns and issues with an aim of blending effective integrated marketing strategies for customer acquisition, retention and business results.

A few key learning points that we could take away from this workshop in terms of implementing services marketing are as follow: –

• The importance of the marketing role and the alignment of marketing strategies with the company’s vision, mission and corporate strategies for organizational performance.
• The formulation of appropriate mix of marketing strategies in response to the changing internal and external environments for generating action plans to close gap and to ensure the company delivers its value propositions to each of its identified target segments.
• The positioning of services brand (the trusted name with unblemished records since establishment) has to be reflected in the behaviours and communications of staff in the practice of marketing, selling and servicing the target markets. Where people are critical in delivering service brand experiences, any negative divergence between expectations and performance will undermine the service brand positioning.
• The consideration of integrating service marketing mix to include people, physical evidence and processes beyond the four Ps mixes. This implies that marketers have to work closely with the cross functional team for synergies to create and deliver services to the target markets at the required level of service quality. In this context, people include company staff that customers come into contact with, physical evidence includes the products and environments, and processes include the activities that form part of the services experiences.

It is important to keep in mind that not all situations are created equal and there is simply no one standard marketing formula for all situations. Therefore, the senior management and marketing managers have to adapt to the different context and environmental variables, gather customers’ insights from possible sources, work up demand forecasting models, and tailor marketing strategies appropriately for each target market while collaborating closely with partners and customers for better business results.

In conclusion, the practice of marketing as an art and science will further enhance the company’s competitive advantage in this dynamic marketplace.