Business Strategy

When I start to talk about marketing, understandably, many people begin to think of advertising or sales or other areas of marketing communications.

This is why, when I’m talking with businesses in the North Nest, I use the expression Business Strategy to talk about the strategic aspects of marketing. One of the reasons so many people are skeptical about marketing is that they get straight into communications before they have given any thought whatsoever to marketing strategy.

Marketing or business strategy is about products or services and markets and customers. It is about making key decisions that determine:

• what products or services you will bring to market
• which markets you will approach
• which segments of those markets will be particularly receptive to your offering
• what position you should adopt in that segment to be competitively differentiated
• what messages will resonate with your target audience
• what tools should you use to deliver the messages (there are only five and that’s the art of marketing communications)
• what media should carry the messages to your market
• how will you measure success or failure and your return on investment

So many people launch into expensive communications campaigns with scant regard for marketing or business strategy and as a result their campaigns fail and they waste valuable financial resources as a result.

Owner managed businesses cannot afford that wastage and so at Corve Consultancy we work firstly on strategy and only then do we create the marketing communications calendars of activity.”