The Need for Strategic Marketing

Many years of working and consulting in the business strategy area has revealed eight common characteristics about the conduct of senior management:

1. Managers often lack a clear articulated statement of corporate vision, business purpose and direction.
   
2. "Objectives" and "strategy" are misused terms.
   
3. Much time is devoted to setting numbers. Little time is allocated to articulating how they are to be achieved.
   
4. The trends and consequences of changes in the macro environments (within which these numbers are to be achieved) is largely unknown and uncharted.
   
5. The qualities by which key customers judge supplier value is unresearched and therefore largely ignored.
   
6. The maturity of customer demand for the supplier's particular solution is largely unknown.