Marketing Essentials

Chapter 2: The Marketing Plan

Chapter Summaries

Section 2.1

• A SWOT analysis identifies a company's internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as external opportunities and threats. Internal strengths and weaknesses are assessed through an analysis of the company, its customers, and its competitive position. External opportunities and threats include political, economic, socio-cultural, and technological factors. Analysis of those four factors is also called an environmental scan.
• A marketing plan is a written document that directs the marketing activities of a company for a specific period of time. The elements of a marketing plan are an executive summary, a situation analysis, marketing goals/objectives, marketing strategies, implementation, evaluation and control, and an appendix.

Section 2.2

• Market segmentation classifies people in a given market into smaller groups. Four methods of segmenting a market are demographics, geographics, psychographics, and buying behavior.
• A target market is identified by four factors: demographics, geographics, psychographics, and behavior. Demographics relates to age, gender, income, marital status, ethnic background, education, and occupation. Geographics relates to similarities among people who live in a certain area. Psychographics groups people with similar lifestyles, attitudes, values, and opinions.
• Mass marketing is using a single marketing strategy to reach all customers, while market segmentation allows marketing to target specific groups of consumers.