Revisiting Recommendations of the Marketing Plan

The key focuses of the marketing plan are as follows:

Cooperative Marketing: Techniques to create additional market awareness for two companies in one ad campaign. Offering discounts to the partners customer on the GGI products
Advertising on Internet: Ads can be put on other companies’ websites, as well, in the form of banners and other “clickable” type links routing potential customers to our website.

Another idea in the marketing plans talks of merging the two points mentioned. We can look at different internet sites for cities and towns, such as their respective Chamber of Commerce and other such sites where new residents, who are looking to furbish their homes, might look to for ideas of where to shop and what products to buy. The companies already respected and listed in the Chamber would be suitable for internet cooperative marketing ad campaigns.

Collaborating with Dealers and Distributors : Dealers and/or independent distributors of our products could be allotted a budget to advertise based on a percentage of their net profits for the last year
Measuring the effectiveness of the Marketing Plan

Jaworski in his definition of marketing control states the Monitoring performance provides one informational means to help planned marketing activities produce desired results (Jaworski 1988, p.24). Control theory assumes that management has a strategy and a known set of intermediary stages (plans) with which actual performance can be compared.

Metrics selection is a key process by which marketing managers can learn to improve performance by adjusting the utility levels associated with marketing. Say, if a company realizes that the performance in one of the marketing channel is not leading to the desired results they can look at realigning their strategy and look at a possibility of investing more in the other marketing avenues.

Philip Kotler lists four types of marketing controls (table 22.1, p.685): annual-plan, profitability, efficiency and strategic. These distinguish whether the company is selecting the right goals (strategic), whether they are being achieved (effectiveness or annual-plan), where the company is making or losing money (profitability) and the return on marketing expenditure (efficiency). (Kotler 2003 pg 685)

In the current landscape the most important for GGI is to expand its base and derive maximum mileage on minimum investment. The challenge is finding maximum share of voice in the cooperative marketing and raise

Profit/Profitability
Sales, Value and/or Volume
Gross Margin
Awareness
Market Share (Volume or Value)
Number of Consumer Complaints (Level of dissatisfaction)
Consumer Satisfaction
Distribution/Availability
Total Number of Customers
Marketing Spend
Perceived Quality/esteem
Loyalty/Retention
TO achieve this, the following metrics are suggested for GGI

The metrics for each marketing channel at a primary level should measure the efficiency of each channel i.e. the ROI on each channel as a whole, be it collaborative marketing or marketing through internet each channel has a role to play in the marketing strategy and that needs to be tracked. Share of wallet in case of distributor’s can be a good tool to be measured here.

Each element of the channel needs to be measured on the following items:
Consumer Attitudes consisting of Awareness, perceived quality, Satisfaction, relevance, image/personality, perceived differentiation,
Consumer Behavior measuring Total number of customers, Number of new customers, reference customers and Loyalty

Accounting would include sales, gross and net margins, profitability
In case of GGI the stated metrics can be applied on the marketing channels like web marketing, cooperative marketing can be evaluated on the ROI. If the ROI of any channel is not satisfactory then the reasons can be explored from the metrics mentioned in point two (for each element). Perhaps one or more elements are not performing as expected.

A remedial measure of finding a suitable element can be done. For example if the returns on the Cooperative marketing are not up to the mark we can view the performance of the elements. If they show inconsistency in data i.e. performance of some elements is satisfactory and others is not then we need to look at switching the partners chosen for cooperative marketing. On the other hand if all the elements reflect a poor quality then the channel strategy needs to be re-looked at.

Improving on Metrics

To improve on the metrics GGI needs to take the individual cases. For Web marketing the company needs to consider the different pricing model for putting up the banners at different websites. These models can be pay per click, fixed time banner, output based banners. The company can also look at Search Engine Optimization, Viral marketing as an extension to the Web marketing

For Cooperative marketing the choice of channels would be the instrumental. Also improving on the share of voice in the common advertisement is importance.  The choice of partner is very critical. The partner should preferable be a complimentary or a reseller of similar products. But the channel dynamics become critical in these cases.

References

Jaworski, Bernard J. (1988), “Toward a Theory of Marketing Control: Environmental Context, Control Types, and Consequences”, Journal of Marketing, Vol.52, No.3, pp.23-39
Kotler, Philip (2003), Marketing Management, (11th edition), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall