Marketing in Brewing and Distilling

 Strategic planning aims to harness a company’s core competencies to capitalise on identified environmental opportunities and minimise or avoid environmental threats.  As marketing managers bridge the gap between company, customers, competitors and channels of distribution, they not only manage their marketing strategies, but also tend to be highly influential in business and corporate strategy-making.  In market-oriented firms, all levels and departments adopt marketing practices. Such organisations follow a business philosophy commonly referred to as the marketing concept.  Because of competitive factors, different stages of industrial and market development and strategic inertia, not all organisations embrace this philosophy.  All well-developed strategies contain five sets of issues: scope, goals and objectives, resource deployments, identification of a sustainable competitive advantage, and synergy.  Strategic planning occurs at different organisational levels, resulting in a hierarchy of interrelated functional, business and corporate strategies. Marketing perspectives underpin all strategies, including those at corporate level.  A well-developed mission statement not only conveys the corporate image, but also guides employees and instils a shared sense of direction.  Specific and measurable corporate objectives act as benchmarks against which performance can be measured.  Sustainable competitive advantage at the corporate level is usually based on unique, often marketing related, company resources.  Two main directions for corporate growth exist: expansion and diversification.  Two types of analytical tool exist to assist management’s resource allocation decisions: portfolio models and value-based planning.  Organisational synergy across a firm’s business and product–markets can be achieved from various sources, such as the firm’s corporate identity and corporate brand, shared resources, and the transfer of knowledge.  The case study shows the importance of marketing perspectives in designing corporate strategies, and when making tough strategic decisions such as how a firm should grow in the future, allocate its precious resources and achieve sustainable competitive advantage.