Marketing Strategy And Marketing Planning: Seven Fundamentals

Good marketing strategy and marketing planning are crucial for business success. But many companies don't truly understand what marketing is, why marketing strategy is important, and how to do marketing planning well. This article covers seven marketing topics:

1. What is marketing?
2. The basic principles of marketing
3. Marketing strategy
4. The marketing plan
5. Customer focus
6. The CEO and marketing
7. Direct marketing

1. What is marketing?

Marketing is the process of planning and executing the development, pricing, promotion and distribution of products and services to targeted customers. Using this definition of marketing, everyone in your organisation is ultimately involved in marketing in some way – not just some narrowly defined "marketing department".