Marketing Planning With 13 Easy Steps

How to create a marketing concept and a business model

Purpose of memo

The purpose of this memo is to outline a way how to create

• a marketing idea and to expand it into

• a marketing concept/plan and, furthermore, indicate the steps to turn it into

• a business model.

Process

For the sake of clarity, with decompose the process of creating a marketing concept into individual steps. Each of the steps has been reformulated as a question, 13 in total. These questions need not be addressed in their numerical sequence. You may wish to start with questions to which the answer is most obvious or intuitive to you. As you will see, all questions entail a series of additional questions which will need to be answered at one point or another.

Overview

In a simplified way, the 13 questions can be bundled into four groups of questions:

• What is the idea, the positioning, the competitive advantage in creating value for the customers and the company?

• What are the strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats this marketing idea is confronted with?

• What are realistic objectives and basic strategies that result from the above SWOT analysis?

• What are the most important marketing mix elements?

Subsequently, this marketing concept can be expanded into a business concept by describing the relevant company structure and processes as well as they resources required to translate the concept into action.

Positioning: four questions

A creative idea is usually at the start of a business venture. This idea has to address the following four questions:

• 1. What problems do I want to solve with my idea, which benefits do I wish to create? This is the crucial question which may decide how viable an idea is.

• 2. For whom do I want to create these benefits, who are my target groups, what are they like, now and in the future?

• 3. What is my solution to their problem, my product or service going to look like?

• 4. In which way will my offer provide superior and sustainable performance, be better than my competitors and create value for the company? Why will my offer be considered superior not just by my customers but also by my shareholders and employees. In summary: why will my offer attract buyers funding and good people?

• When describing an existing brand situation, it can be useful to add the following at this point of the paper:

• Current vision, objectives and where the brand stands currently

• Current marketing mix

The SWOT: four questions

Following the usually enthusiastic creative part, a very often sobering analysis is in order with respect to the idea or the current brand situation:

• 5. What are the strengths of my idea (or the current situation)?

• 6. What are the weaknesses?

• 7. What are the opportunities the environment is going