Today’s ever-changing marketing environment, accompanied by unpredictable competitive actions, creates uncertainty for enterprises and presents dilemmas, challenges and problem situations that necessitate planning ahead in order to survive. Directional/strategic marketing planning presents a step-by-step approach to developing plans that give direction to future marketing actions.

Directional/strategic marketing planning begins with the marketing audit, which provides a clear understanding of the enterprise’s current position in the market, the nature of the opportunities and threats in the external environment, and the enterprise’s internal strengths and weaknesses. Once the basic directional market options available in the future have been determined, specific decisions that the marketer needs to make, given a range of specific plans, are discussed.

Contents include the following:

• Variables of the market environment
• Macroenvironmental factors
• Review of sustainable competitive advantages of the enterprise
• Marketing plan objectives
• The distribution function
• Enterprise-to-enterprise marketing
• The commercial services marketing mix
• Decision to enter a foreign market and collection of information

Directional/strategic marketing planning is aimed at third and fourth year marketing students.