What role does the mission statement play in marketing planning?

What role does the mission statement play in marketing planning?

In practice, a strong mission statement can help in three main ways:
• It provides an outline of how the marketing plan should seek to fulfil the mission
• It provides a means of evaluating and screening the marketing plan; are marketing decisions consistent with the mission?
• It provides an incentive to implement the marketing plan

Marketing Objectives

Let’s face it.  Of the four main functional areas of a business, marketing has to be the most important!
Marketing is at the heart of a business.  Remember the definition of marketing:

“The process of identifying, anticipating (predicting) and satisfying customer needs profitably”

Almost every activity that a business undertakes can be linked back to this definition, whether it is:

Raising finance to support an investment in new product development

Introducing quality assurance and lean production to improve product profitability

Training staff to improve customer service standards

Ultimately, almost every functional activity or objective can be linked back to marketing.

A similar picture emerges when you consider how corporate objectives link to the functional objectives for marketing.

Typical corporate objectives might be to:

Be a market leader within 5 years

To grow market share by 5% in core markets

To become the most trusted and recognised brand in our industry

Each of these has a strong marketing element.

Marketing objectives need to be seen as part of a hierarchy of objectives, in the sense that they are shaped and informed by the corporate objectives.  A corporate objective influences a marketing objective, which in turn shapes the marketing strategies and marketing tactics employed:

Because marketing is involved in every aspect of a business, you often find that marketing objectives are wide-ranging.  There can also be a lot of them!  Some examples are provided below

Objective area	Example objectives
Maintaining or increasing market share	Achieve revenue growth of 15% per year for the next four years Increase our market share in the UK by 4% by 2012 Improve the online order conversion rate from 65% to 75% by 2011 Add 1,000 new customer accounts generating at least £100,000 per account within three years Become the market leader in the UK educational sector by 2013
Developing new products / innovation	Launch at least 25 new products into the industrial channel in 2010 and 2011 Grow average first-year sales of new editions by 25% in the Higher Education sector
Meeting the needs of customers	Achieve at least an 95% excellent customer service rating each month Increase the proportion of sales bookings from repeat business to 45% for the summer season
Entering a new market / market positioning	Supply a minimum of 50,000 trial downloads per month Increase the number of customer enquiries from the EU by 10,000 per month Recruit five suitable distribution agents in the four target countries within 12 months
Gaining an advantage over competitors	Reduce average distribution costs to less than 5% of gross revenue Reduce the order lead time by 15% Improve brand recognition amongst the 25-34 age group