You and your team will be responsible for the design and implementation of the marketing strategy of your division. You will have to decide the overall direction of the company regarding:
•The product portfolio strategy – which brands the company will develop and market;
•The segmentation and positioning strategy – which market segments will be targeted and how products will be positioned;
•The marketing mix strategy – the day-to-day operational marketing decisions such as pricing, production, communication and distribution.
Your performance will be measured by several indicators such as net contribution generated, brand market shares, your ability to grow the firms’ revenues, quality of R&D projects successfully completed, etc. Finally, the best measure of your company's success will be its stock price index, a measure that takes all of the above indicators into account.
This chapter describes how your company operates as well as the decisions you will have to make each period. Before making dramatic changes, you should try to get a feel for the behavior of the market. Do not jump hastily to conclusions and bear in mind that obvious solutions may be based upon an incomplete analysis. To reach more robust decisions, use the information from your company results, from the market news and from market research studies to analyze your situation and past competitive behavior. These reports are described in the chapter entitled Understanding Your Annual Report.
You will manage the Marketing department as a profit center. We will see in the next paragraphs that most of your decisions will cost you money: advertising budgets, commercial team expenditures, R&D expenses, etc. We will recap all of these costs at the end of the chapter and we will explain where your money comes from.