Marketing Skills: Why Marketing Matters: A Strategic Grounding for Senior Managers

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Course Overview

Modern businesses compete in complex global marketplaces. Competition has never been so fierce. Well organised, high quality, low cost competitors are emerging daily. We can no longer rely upon our belief that traditional product, service and technological superiorities are sufficient to retain and grow our businesses in an environment such as this. We need a new model in which we deliberately create and deliver superior VALUE to our customers and use this to guide our business development plans and strategies.

The purpose of this course:

This course will deliver to senior business leaders the necessary philosophies, concepts and tools to enable their organisations to compete in today's markets. We will examine the concept of value in detail and demonstrate how this can be mobilised to create exceptional business performance. We will study in depth how customers, markets and competitors think, and how this insight can create new and exciting opportunities for our enterprises.

Benefits for your organisation:

Your organisation will get the benefit of an increasing awareness of how effective marketing strategies impact on achieving corporate objectives, and how these will lead to performance and profit improvements. A greater understanding of customers, competitors and organisational structure and communication will lead to sharper strategic focus that contributes to improved top and bottom lines.

Benefits for you as an individual:

The principles and practice of marketing are explored at a philosophical and at a strategic level through both case work and discussions with colleagues centred upon real organisations. As the result of this you will be able to analyse complex and challenging business situations, from a strategic marketing perspective, and be able to contribute real value to your organisation's marketing efforts and activities.

Audience

This course is targeted at executives and managers with significant business experience. We expect participants to be able to interact with senior people from other organisations.

Previous participants have included MDs, CEOs, Presidents and VPs, successful entrepreneurs, senior academics, professionals and functional heads from significant commercial organisations.

Skills Gained

You will learn how to:

• Apply the guiding principles and philosophies of marketing at mature level, and how these contribute to organisational viability, growth and profitability
• Analyse markets and customers from a value perspective and how to use this knowledge to improve overall business performance
• Identify sources of competitive advantage and how these can be applied in developing an effective competitive strategy
• Build a value based marketing strategy which mobilises the real capabilities of your organisation.
• Challenge marketing plans and proposals effectively while adding value to them
• Critically evaluate alternative marketing approaches
• Use market and customer knowledge to create and execute realistic value propositions for different groups
• Contribute to the development of a customer-focused orientation

Course Outline

• Overview of the relevance and importance of marketing as a business philosophy and as a business function
• The role of marketing in identifying and exploiting competitive advantage
• The Value Triad and how this is applied in building effective marketing and business development initiatives
• The importance of capturing and leveraging innovation
• Key marketing concepts of segmentation, targeting and positioning to create competitive marketing strategies
• The principal marketing mix tools and assembling these into a meaningful action plan
• Understanding the discipline of strategic marketing planning ie. ensuring that marketing plans, tasks, activities and organisation are consistent with, and aligned to, the changing business environment
• Contemporary case studies

Pre and post learning support:

Delegates will be expected to engage in discussions of marketing principles and how these apply to their own organisations. As preparation for this delegation will find it useful to understand how their organisation undertakes its marketing and business development activities and in particular what value it delivers to its customers. Some pre-course reading will be set, typically current case studies and articles from the recent business press. A bibliography will be provided to signpost delegates to further relevant books and articles.

Marketing Skills: Why Marketing Matters: A Strategic Grounding for Senior Managers / 0173