From marketing planning training through to leadership coaching, Hard Management offers a unique approach to gaining sustainable competitive advantage.

Marketing Planning

Peter Drucker describes the role of marketing thus:

"There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available. ."

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Hard Management offers a range of services to help companies become market-led:

• marketing training
• marketing consultancy
• marketing coaching
• marketing projects

One of the foundations of the market-led approach is the marketing plan and Hard Management can assist at each stage of the marketing planning process. Our input varies from undertaking stand-alone projects such as a marketing audit to establish your current position (internally and externally) through to consultancy to help evaluate potential new markets and products. A common approach is for us to run a number of training sessions to provide managers with a thorough grounding in key marketing planning topics such as:

• branding
• differentiation
• market segmentation
• forecasting
• pricing

From here we can provide on-going support through consultancy or by working with individual managers.

Or you can outsource the creation of the marketing plan to us. (We don't go away to a darkened room to write it - you and your team will be heavily involved throughout; however, we will manage the process and the production of the final document.)

Marketing planning - marketing skills are not enough

Effective marketing plans require more than conventional marketing skills. First we have to ensure that the plan will actually increase the value of the firm. This does not simply mean, "Will we generate a profit this year"; many profitable firms are actually declining in value. "Value" looks beyond the traditional financial statements, P&L and Balance Sheet, and considers the assets that do not appear on either of these and yet are the most important assets in the business - the intangibles:

• brand
• customer and supplier relationships
• skills, knowledge, experience and attitudes
• etc

The financial aspects of the marketing plan must incorporate these elements - otherwise the firm becomes trapped in short-term-ism, shying away from the required investments to gain long-term sustainable competitive advantage. Hard Management has considerable expertise in this area - visit our finance pages for more information. We can even provide training or consultancy to help build Excel models to support your marketing planning activities.

Please use the links below or the menu at the top of the page (hover over our logo) to find out more about our services.

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