Effectiveness of Marketing Strategies

The value of an Effective Marketing Strategy is undeniably an essential part on having a business; this would determine what are the things needed to be done in order in order to accomplish the establishment goals.

According to (David Aaker, 2008) he defined marketing strategy as a process that can allow an organization to concentrate its resources on the optimal opportunities with the goals of increasing sales and achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. In other words, creating or developing a marketing strategy is not an easy task for the establishment’s management it would take an in depth analysis and consideration on the establishment’s resources and full and effective efforts of its staff and also the changing trends on the market in order to create or apply and efficient and effective marketing strategy that would contribute to the establishment’s goals. Hence, constant evaluation on the marketing strategies used by establishments is required in order to keep it in line with their establishment’s goals and to show that the establishment competitively exists in the market. In addition, adequate knowledge and managerial skills towards marketing is required in order to achieve desirable consequences.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
This study will help the establishment’s management, on creating and applying effective and efficient marketing strategy on their establishment based on the thorough analysis of their resources and marketing environment on accomplishing their goals. This study will also help the local government unit of the City of Mati on increasing tourist population as well as the income of tourism on the locality by basically reviewing the key components of this study and most of all, it would give an idea or guide potential international or domestic investors on what are the things they needed to do in order invest on the resorts market in the City of Mati. OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

General Objectives
The general objective of this study is to assess the effectiveness of
marketing strategies used by resorts in the City of Mati. Specific objectives
1. To investigate whether the establishment has its own written marketing strategy.
2. To determine how well their marketing strategy performs on the market by interpreting the collected data from the establishment
3. To conclude whether the establishment existing marketing strategies used is congruent with their establishment goals.

SCOPE AND DELIMITATION
This research focuses only on the assessment on the effectiveness of the marketing strategies used by beach resorts in the City of Mati. Blue Bless Beach Resort, Cinco Masao Beach Resort, Gregorio Beach Resort, Kanakbai beach resort and Pacific Breeze Beach resort were the chosen establishments to conduct this study. THEORITICAL FRAMEWORK

Figure. 1 Assessing Marketing Strategy Performance
(Moorman and Lehman, 2004)

In Figure 1. The concepts shows a complex explanation on assessing marketing strategy performance which tells about the in depth consideration of Internal Firms Resources and Capabilities and Environment on developing a marketing strategy, its direct link to the firms performance. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Figure 2. Assessing Marketing Strategy Performance (Simplified) In figure 2 the concepts shows the big influence of firm’s resources and environment (antecedent variable) towards the creation or implementation of marketing strategy (dependent variable) and its direct on effect firm’s performance (independent variable). However, this framework emphasizes the great importance of the two antecedent variables unto the creation of the dependent variable. DEFINITION OF TERMS

1. Marketing – is a study in which how and what would the establishment/firm would be able to do in order fulfill the needs and wants other their clients. 2. Firm Resources – is the ability and capability of the firm/establishment to perform the marketing strategy 3. Environment- defined constantly changing trends on the market. 4. Marketing Strategy – is the output of the detailed analysis on between the firms resources and Environment on how would they be able to get capture and maintain their market share. 5. Firms Performance – defined as the final output of the applied marketing strategy and its effects towards the firm or establishment goal.

CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
This Chapter presents the related review of literature composed of readings taken mostly from books, internet and other materials, published or unpublished. The term marketing is defined as a social and managerial process designed to meet the needs and requirements of consumers through the processes of creating and exchanging products and values. It is the art and science of identifying, creating and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market, making a profit: delivery of satisfaction at a price.(Pallavicini, 1959) Marketing as a science and a profession guided principally by the universal principles of ethics, corporate citizenship and corporate social responsibility and to serve as a policy-making and recommendatory arm of the government on marketing-related issues.(Philippine Marketing Association) Marketing is the process of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling that product or service. (www.wikipedia.org)

The field of marketing strategy considers the total marketing environment and its impacts on a company or product or service. The emphasis is on “an in depth understanding of the market environment, particularly the competitors and customers.” A marketing strategy differs from a marketing tactic in that a strategy looks at the longer term view of the products, goods, or services being marketed. A tactic refers to a shorter term view. A marketing strategy considers the resources a firm has, or is required to allocate in effort to achieve an objective. Marketing Strategies include the process and planning in which a firm may be expected to achieve their company goals, in which usually involves an effort to increase revenue or assets, through a series of milestones or benchmarks of business and promotional activities.

Marketing plays a pivotal role in the achievement of organizational objectives. After all, an effective marketing strategy translates to increased sales; which in turn, leads to larger profit margins for companies. To ensure that all marketing activities achieve their purpose, company managers now see the need to quantify marketing performance or marketing effectiveness. (Source: Learning How to Measure Marketing Effectiveness, Sam Miller, 2008) Evaluation is an important part of marketing: it helps your company eliminate ineffective strategies and develop an overall plan that helps build your business. By scheduling regular evaluations of your marketing plan, you can save wasted money by modifying or eliminating campaigns that are not reaching your target market or garnering the response you need. As you plan, build in mechanisms to monitor the success of each marketing effort to make evaluation cheaper and easier. (Source: How to Evaluate Marketing Strategies, Elizabeth Smith, Ehow.com Contributor)

Five core strategies are needed to measure marketing effectiveness 1. Plan ahead and design a response-attribution infrastructure to support all channels Many organizations treat marketing measurement as an afterthought of campaign planning. However, measurement and reporting are critical items on the campaign-planning agenda. Up-front planning ensures the appropriate tracking and testing conditions. 2. Create control groups for a more-accurate measurement of campaign lift A lack of a centralized planning process frequently hinders a marketer’s ability to design and execute cross-channel campaigns without polluting control groups, preventing accurate attribution, and biasing measurement analyses. Defined control groups help to accurately measure true campaign-lift metrics. Organizations that have marketing-planning and campaign-management tools are able to create and manage control groups much more effectively. 3. Define relevant measurement metrics

Organizations must define relevant metrics and measurement criteria, taking care to systematically craft a metrics framework aligned with corporate strategy and provide meaningful data to key stakeholders. The metrics must correlate the marketing activities (cause) with the marketing performance, financial results, and customer impact (effect). 4. Define specific attribution rules by campaign

Attribution rules are a function of a campaign’s goals, the response channels, and the outbound communications. Among the strategies for developing attribution rules are the following: Designing and capturing rules for all channels in a campaign or program Understanding that tracking customer response may require some trial and error Focusing on more-generalized rules, devoting less attention to rules designed to manage a small percentage of responses Testing and validating rules for each campaign because different campaigns may behave differently Applying a waterfall approach for matching responses so that more-accurate rules can be assigned a higher priority 5. Automate and use visual reporting and analytic tools

Organizations can use many tools to automate portions of the tracking and reporting process. Those tools can be configured to regularly track selected metrics on a periodic basis and produce reports or graphs, which can be consumed by small or large audiences.

(Source: Five Essential Strategies for Measuring Marketing Effectiveness, Krishnamurthy & Ewald, 2009)

Chapter 3
This Chapter describes the methods and the procedures’ applied on how to achieve the objectives of this research. The study had been made through thorough research on the published, unpublished books and the web to gather the information regarding the assessment on the effectiveness of the marketing strategies used by the beach resorts in the City of Mati.