Trade marketing

Introduction

Every company designs strategic plans to achieve their set objectives and goals. These plans can be short, medium, or long-term, according to the size and scope of the company.

It is very important that the company specifies accurately and carefully its mission. The mission is fundamental since it represents the operative functions that the company is going to perform inthe market and supply to the consumers.

For a company, it is very important to define its mission, and if they are carefully devised they are a source of success for the company. Revised missions have turned the destiny of many companies.

In the following report, a Strategic Marketing Plan for the Corporate International Department of the Raiffeisenlandesbank Steiermark Bank is introduced. Thefirst part introduces the theoretical description to take into account for its development. The second part is basically a departmental analysis, to then set the objectives and goals on the base of the needs of the Market and the results from the last 12 months, together with the application of this Strategic Marketing Plan.

Strategic Planning is a management system that moves the focus from "whatto achieve" (objectives) to "what to do" (strategies). With Strategic Planning the aim is to focus on those objectives that are possible to achieve and in what business or area to compete, in correspondence with the opportunities and threats that the environment offers.

The essence of strategic planning is the systematic identification of the opportunities and threats that will arise in thefuture, which, combined with other important data, supply the base for a company to make better decisions in the present to exploit opportunities and avoid dangers.

Sallenave (1991) states that "Strategic Planning is the process by which managers order their objectives and their actions in time. It is not a domain of top management, but a communication and decision making process in which all thestrategic levels of the company take part". The aim of Strategic Planning is to produce deep changes in the organisation’s market and in its internal culture.

Strategic planning demands four, well-defined stages: mission statement and organisational objectives, analysis of company strengths and weaknesses, environment analysis, and strategy statement.

Values, Mission, Vision, ObjectivesTo correctly define Strategic Planning, it is necessary to consider four different points of view, each of which are necessary for its understanding:

THE FUTURE OF CURRENT DECISIONS: First, planning deals with the future of current decisions. This means that Strategic Planning observes the chain of consequences of causes and effects for some time, related with a real or intended decision thatthe Management will make. Strategic Planning also observes possible alternatives of future courses of action, and by choosing the alternatives, they turn into the base for making current decisions. The essence of Strategic Planning is the systematic identification of the opportunities and threats that will arise in the future, which, combined with other important data, supply the base for a companyto make better decisions in the present to exploit opportunities and avoid dangers. Planning means to design a desired future and to identify the ways to make it.

PROCESS: Second, Strategic Planning is a process that starts with setting organisational goals, it defines strategies and policies to achieve those goals, and it develops detailed plans to ensure the implantation of the strategies,thus reaching the desired aims. It is also a process to decide beforehand what kind of planning efforts shall be made, when, and how they shall be done, who will do them, and what will be done with the results. Strategic Planning is systematic in the sense that it is organised and conducted based on understood reality.

For most of the companies, Strategic Planning represents a series of plans...