The price we pay when the Cape Doctor (South-Easter) does not blow, plus the Reactor strategy.

Hi,

Well that is Sunday nearly behind us and a new week ahead, may you grab every opportunity and crush every threat.

Table Mountain, Lion's Head and Signal Hill from the Northern Suburbs of Cape Town.

Today, for late May was amazing, at lunchtime when I took the above photograph the temperature was 29,5 degrees Celsius, which is a lot more like summer than late autumn/early winter in Cape Town. 

A lazy kind of day, watched the MotoGP qualifying session before getting the motorcycles out of the garage. A quick ride out to the northern suburbs of Cape Town, lunch at  Greens in Plattekloof, very nice (thanks Minnie) and then back to Rondebosch via Cape Town. A pleasant enough ride, due to the fact that we only got out at 12h00 we encountered a great deal of 4 wheeled iron cages on the roads.

The photograph above demonstrates why the south-east wind in Cape Town is known as the Cape Doctor. On windless days like today the smog hangs over the City Bowl and obscures our beautiful mountain, fortunately it blows most days, some times to hard but keeps our skyline clear. 

Marketing Strategy: Reactors

Reactors do not have a strategy, they are not customer orientated and adopt a me-too approach to marketing. In my opinion, no vision, no plan, no strategy - anywhere will do, not to be recommended. Reactors tend to react slowly to environmental changes, often due to limited resources. In this day and age of incremental change and environmental shocks a dangerous position for those pursuing this strategy. The market and macro environments are in a state of flux and the opportunities and threats that your business has to address needs to be identified proactively. Reacting to environmental change only after your competitors have will always place you at a disadvantage, you are unlikely ever to be better than me-too or an also ran. Reactors consistently find themselves in a crisis position and have to resort to crisis management with resultant decision making focusing on the short-term versus the long term.

If the above sums up your organisation, you quickly need to adopt a turn-around strategy and find some form of competitive advantage, failure to do so could have dire consequences that will eventually lead to the demise of your company.

That brings us to the end of this view of marketing strategy, again, my thanks to Arnould, Price and Zinkhan the authors of Consumers for their perspective. 

I was asked to provide a short summary on strategy:

You need a clearly defined target market of sufficient size and accessible to your marketing efforts, you need a product that exceeds the target market's expectation, at a price that they are prepared to pay, effectively communicated to them in media that they are exposed to and distributed to them in a manner that they approve. (Target market and the 4P's).

Lately, Philip Kotler and Gary Armstrong have been presenting it as the 4C's, I like this as it ensures a customer orientation.

Customer Solution (Product)

Customer Cost (Price)

Customer Communication (Integrated Marketing Communications or the old Promotion)

and

Customer Convenience (Distribution or the old Place).

In my experience viewing strategy from this perspective helps companies to focus first on the customer and move towards a true customer orientation versus the old sales and product orientations.

Until next time,

Ciao.