tailieunhanh - Ebook Marketing strategy (5th edition): Part 2

(BQ) Part 2 book "Marketing strategy" has contents: Marketing Implementation and control, developing and maintaining long term customer relationships, tools for developing a marketing plan, cases. | 11 C H A P T E R Marketing Implementation and Control Introduction T hroughout the history of business, many firms and their top executives have emphasized strategic planning at the expense of strategic implementation. Historically, and even today, this emphasis on planning occurs because many executives believe that strategic planning, by itself, is the key to marketing success. This belief is logical because a firm must have a plan before it can determine where it is going. Many firms are quite good at devising strategic marketing plans; however, they are often unprepared to cope with the realities of implementation. Marketing implementation is the process of executing the marketing strategy by creating and performing specific actions that will ensure the achievement of the firm’s marketing objectives. Strategic planning without effective implementation can produce unintended consequences that result in customer dissatisfaction and feelings of frustration within the firm. Likewise, poor implementation will most likely result in the firm’s failure to reach its organizational and marketing objectives. Unfortunately, many firms repeatedly experience failures in marketing implementation. Out-of-stock items, overly aggressive salespeople, long checkout lines, and unfriendly or inattentive employees are examples of implementation failure that occur all too frequently today. These and other examples illustrate that even the best-planned marketing strategies are a waste of time without effective implementation to ensure their success. To track the implementation process, firms must have ways of evaluating and controlling marketing activities, as well as monitoring performance to determine whether marketing goals and objectives have been achieved. As illustrated in Beyond the Pages , implementation, evaluation, and control go hand in hand in determining the success or failure of the marketing strategy, and ultimately the entire firm. One of the most important .