Marketing and Business Planning: Key Concepts

Posted on Mar 21, 2025 in Marketing

Marketing and Business Planning

Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It defines, measures, and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit potential.

A business plan is a written document that describes in detail how a business, whether new or established (undergoing a new strategic direction or adapting to market reality), will achieve its goals from a marketing, commercial, financial, and operational viewpoint.

Creating an Effective Business Plan

To achieve its goals, a business plan should:

  • Conduct thorough research.
  • Determine the purpose (scope) of your plan: 3 to 5 years’ time.
  • Divide goals into short-term and long-term objectives.
  • State clearly if the plan is internal (to help avoid bumps in the road) or intended to attract investors.
  • Be clear, concise, and realistic.
  • Create a company profile (vision, mission, values, targets).
  • Document all aspects of your business (expenses, cash flow, and industry projections).
  • Have departmental plans in place, fundamentally a strategic marketing plan (which addresses the main company’s goal: VALUE CREATION).
  • Make it adaptable based on your audience.
  • Explain why you care (balance profit and purpose).

Marketing Plan Essentials

A marketing plan is a written document that supports the business plan objectives and describes the marketing efforts to achieve the goals. It includes:

  • Marketing situation
  • Target markets
  • Company positioning and goals
  • Marketing actions and tools to reach the marketing goals

Key components of a marketing plan:

  • Executive Summary
  • Situation Analysis – Background
  • Strategic plan and goals
  • Actions and timeline
  • Marketing tools
  • Budget and Control methods

Microenvironment Analysis

Factors to consider in a microenvironment analysis:

  • Political: Public Policy, Competition Laws, Fair trade practices laws, Environmental Protection, Product Safety, Truth in advertising, Pricing, Consumer Privacy, Packaging and labeling.
  • Economical: Changes in consumer spending, Income distribution.
  • Social: The changing age structure of the population, the changing family structure, Geographic shifts in population, Better qualified population, Increasing diversity.
  • Technological
  • Environmental
  • Legal

Micro-environment Components

Key components of the micro-environment:

  • Company
  • Public: Actual or potential interest in or impact on an organization’s ability to achieve its objectives (financial, media, government, local, internal).
  • Suppliers
  • Intermediaries: Promote, sell, and distribute.
  • Competition: Offers a similar product or service. The presence of one or more competitors can reduce the prices of goods and services as the companies attempt to gain a larger market share.

Analyzing Competition

Consider these factors when analyzing competition:

  • Hotels with similar characteristics
  • Hotels in a specific area
  • Rates
  • Reviews
  • Internal structures
  • Hotel concept
  • Strategies they are employing

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis assesses what a company or business can and cannot do, determines what assists the firm in accomplishing its objectives, and what obstacles must be overcome or minimized to achieve desired results.

Needs, Wants, and Segmentation

  • Needs: States of felt deprivation.
  • Wants: Shape adopted by human needs when conformed by culture and individual personality.
  • Segmentation: Sharing one or more characteristics or needs in an otherwise homogeneous market, generally responding in a predictable manner to a marketing or promotion offer.

Key Segmentation Variables

Important variables for market segmentation:

  • Geographic: Continents, countries, cities, regions, districts…
  • Demographic: Age (baby boomers, Millennials), gender, marital status, incomes, education, occupation…
  • Psychographic: Lifestyle, shared activities, social status, opinions, values of customers…
  • Behavioralistic: Purchase frequency, loyalty, ticket value average.

Brand segmentation answers the evolving nature of customer’s segments.

Macroenvironment Factors

The larger societal forces that affect the micro-environment:

  • Demographic
  • Economic
  • Natural
  • Technological
  • Political
  • Cultural forces

PESTEL: Politics, Economics, Social & cultural, Technological, Ecological, Legal.

Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning (STP)

  • Segmentation: Define the criteria to segment the market, Develop profile / clusters for each segment.
  • Targeting: Measure the potential of each segment, Select the segments: Target Group/s.
  • Positioning: Develop the Positioning for each Target Group, Define the Marketing Mix for each Target Group.