Strategic marketing sets out the main orientations of the company’s strategy or the “business” strategy of an activity along two coordinated but distinct lines.
It should be remembered in passing that, in the technology company whose internal organisation of market/customer/competition activities is less ‘standardised’ than that of the marketing departments in B2C, the two types of action will not necessarily be housed within the marketing department. These two axes are market strategy and product strategy.
Market and product strategy
Market strategy and product strategy are by nature coordinated since some products will only address certain market segments: there will therefore be a “matching matrix” between products and market segments.
The market strategy consists of defining the priorities and resources allocated to the market/customer/project axis. This will involve:
- Define the main lines of the go to market, brand, promotion and communication strategy for all market segments
- Organise business development actions
- Organise actions with influencers
- Segment the global market into possible market segments
- Define which of these possible segments will be the target segments
- Adapt for each of the target segments what the company’s positioning will be in relation to the competition, what the most suitable products, services and offers will be, what the go to market and pricing will be, what the business development, promotion and communication actions will be
- Manage the client portfolio and the client experience; major accounts, medium-sized clients, small clients, etc.
- Organise actions with the different types of decision-makers at the customer’s premises according to their function (the “audiences”): general management, financial decision-makers, technical decision-makers, users, etc.
- Helping to detect project opportunities and supporting project capture if the company is in the project or product-project business
There is therefore a permanent dialogue in technology between market strategy and product strategy, which must be balanced. The former provides a cross-sectional vision and harmonises actions across all market segments and the latter provides a cross-sectional vision and harmonises actions across the entire product and service portfolio.
Logically, market strategy should precede product strategy since products are one of the means of action in a market along with prices, go to market and communication.
However, and this is a characteristic of technology companies, in practice we can observe quite different balances and modes of organisation between ‘market marketing strategy’ and ‘product marketing strategy’ in technology.
The marketing department is sometimes responsible for both dimensions. However, the technical culture of the company often leads it to organise itself essentially around products and product strategy, practising product marketing rather than market marketing.
It will then be necessary to ensure that the market strategy is taken into account elsewhere in the company. If it is at the level of the global strategy, it will be necessary to ensure that this strategy is capable of ‘going down to the level of the market segments’ and of steering the marketing strategy by market segment.
