Marketing Strategies

How to Maximize your Marketing Strategies

Companies are in business to do one thing, make money. To meet this goal every company needs to develop one or more marketing strategies that will allow them to maximize the benefits of their marketing resources, as well as to establish and maintain their competitive advantage. There are several different ways that a company can establish their marketing strategies including focusing on: market dominance, generic strategies, innovative strategies and growth strategies.

Marketing Dominance

The first thing that a company can look at when developing their marketing strategies is to look at their market dominance. Companies can either be the leader, a follower or a challenger in a market. Each of these positions has its own pros and cons, and the company needs to decide which position their company is better suited to fill.

Generic Strategies

Generic marketing strategies look at the company's market penetration. Market penetration involves elements such as: market segmentation, product differentiation and cost leadership. When developing a marketing strategy, the company will need to look at each of these elements and determine how to maximize the company's market penetration by adjusting various aspects of their marketing campaign. For example, a cereal company may have a product that is competing with Cheerios[R]. Obviously since this product is a widely recognized brand name cereal they can get away with charging more for their box of O's, however, in order to sell more of their cereal the competing company may want to price their comparable box of O's significantly lower than a box of Cheerios[R].

Innovative Strategies

Innovative strategies are basically just new product develop strategies. In order to stay competitive, companies need to periodically develop and introduce new products and updates to their established products. When developing innovative strategies the company needs to decide whether they want to be a pioneer of innovations, a follower or a late follower of innovations.

The advantage of being a pioneer is obvious; you are the first on the scene with a new technology or product. The drawback is that your product will be somewhat experimental and have glitches that will need to be worked out. Followers, on the other hand, have the advantage of entering an established market where the demand for the product has already been developed, and they know what the glitches are and can fix them before releasing their product. Late followers, also referred to as third generation producers, enter the market where there is an established demand, where the technology has been evolved and developed and where the production of the technology is much less expensive.

Growth Strategies

The final area of marketing strategy that a company needs to examine is the company's growth strategy. Growth strategies look at the structure of the company and its product lines. Changes can be made to the: horizontal or vertical integration models, diversification of the product and service line and to the intensification of the product and service lines.