Strategy
* Generation of New Business Development Ideas
* Development of competitive Business Strategies
* Preparation of professional Business Plans
* Generation of new Marketing and Sales Ideas
* Development of innovative Marketing Strategies
* Preparation of professional Marketing Plans
Innovation
* Generation of New Product Development Ideas
* Concept Development for New Product Ideas
International/Global
* Formulation of International Market-Entry Strategies
* Formulation of International Market Development Strategies
* Formulation of Global Marketing and Brand Strategies
Structure
* Setting up the (International/Global) Marketing Function
* Restructuring the (International/Global) Marketing Function
Analysis
* Business Unit Analysis
* Brand and Portfolio Analysis
* Competitors' Analysis
* Industry and Market Analysis
* Assessment of International Markets and Country Risks
Reviewing
* Review of proprietary business strategies and plans
* Review of proprietary marketing strategies and plans
Editing
* Preparation of professional plans for Your Business Ideas
* Preparation of professional plans for Your Marketing Ideas
You choose. We deliver.
We do not stop at consulting but take responsibility, not least for the successful implementation of our recommendations. We are available to advise and coach you during the implementation stage. If you should currently lack the management resources or expertise to execute the required action yourself in due time, we could act as an interim manager to put the plan into action. We are highly flexible and mobile – also internationally or globally, if and when required.
If you are interested in our Biz Strategist services, please contact us by phone or email.
The late Theodore (Ted) Levitt, a former Harvard Business School scholar (renowned as the Harvard Business School's "guru of marketing") and former editor of the Harvard Business Review, is one of the most widely read and respected authorities in management and marketing.
In his acclaimed 1983 classic "The Marketing Imagination", Professor Theodore Levitt provided a wonderful perspective on how marketing shapes business and the corporate purpose. The following is a condensed version of an excerpt from Chapter 7, which can be downloaded as a PDF file via the link provided further below.
"Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The marketing imagination is the starting point of success in marketing. It is distinguished from other forms of imagination by the unique insights it brings to understanding customers, their problems, and the means to capture their attention and their custom. By asserting that people don't buy things but buy solutions to problems, the marketing imagination makes an inspired leap from the obvious to the meaningful.
The search for meaningful distinction is a central part of the marketing effort. If marketing is seminally about anything, it is about achieving customer-getting distinction by differentiating what you do and how you operate. All else is derivative of that and only that. Differentiation represents an imaginative response to the existence of potential customers in such a way as to give them compelling reasons to want to do business with the originating supplier. To differentiate an offering effectively requires knowing what drives and attracts customers. It requires knowing how customers differ from one another and how those differences can be clustered into commercially meaningful segments. The discovery of the simple essence of things is the essence of the marketing imagination.
Imagination means to construct mental pictures of what is or is not actually present, what has never been actually experienced. It usually requires combining disparate facts or ideas into new amalgamations of meanings. In marketing the object is to get and keep a customer, and also to get existing buyers to prefer to do business with you rather than your competitors. In marketing, therefore, the imagination must constantly focus on that objective. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going.
Business success is a matter of the disproportionate and enduring attraction of certain proportions of customers at certain enduring levels of relative price. Most significantly, it is a story that defines the purpose of business in terms of marketing – once again, getting and keeping customers. This therefore installs marketing at the center of what's done in corporate strategic planning.
Strategic planning involves defining what's to be done, the allocation of resources for their maximization. It is wrong to say that the most important and creatively challenging act of corporate decision-making is about choices regarding what's to be done. The most important and challenging work involves thinking up the possibilities from among which choices have to be made. To select among stipulated possibilities is to make choices of preferences, not decisions about appropriateness. A possibility has to be created before it can be chosen. Therefore to think up the possibilities from which choices might be made is to engage in acts of creative imagination.
Strategic planning is inescapably rooted in marketing matters, in the need to respond to realities, the actualities of the market's unyielding requisites. The most dramatic and visible realities that so obviously destroy companies are usually fiscal: insufficient cash flow to finance debt and interest payments, to pay vendors, and the like. These usually make the headlines, because they lead so often and so obviously to bankruptcy. Often they are due to wrong decisions about purely financial affairs. Most commonly such wrong decisions are based on miscalculations or plain dumb assumptions about the market place – that sales would be sufficiently good, prices sufficiently high, accounts receivable sufficiently low and short-term. Hence, fiscal failure originates in the market place.
Marketing is inescapable in the determination of corporate results. The reason is that marketing deals with the sources and levels of the revenues that help determine the corporate fate. Since marketing means getting and keeping customers in some acceptable proportion relative to competitors, it is to the marketing imagination one must look to gain differential advantage over competitors. In business, the marketing imagination is the central tool for deciding on what the purposes are to be."
It was Professor Theodore Levitt's early landmark articles in the Harvard Business Review which, while I was still a student, spurred my desire to work in marketing – at a time, when marketing was not yet lectured at German universities and an unknown term among the general public. From "Marketing Myopia" to "Innovation in Marketing" to "The Marketing Mode", from "Exploit the Product Life Cycle" to "The Globalization of Markets" to "The Marketing Imagination", Professor Levitt shaped and enriched my marketing thinking from early on. His insights also inspired me to choose "The Product Life Cycle Concept as a Marketing Decision Model" as the subject of my thesis – quite an exotic choice back then (my co-students used to write about production and cost theory, operations research, etc.).
It was not until 1985 in London that I should finally get the opportunity to meet and listen to Professor Levitt in person at a convention on "Going Global". Not surprisingly, it was Ted Levitt who had first recognized, written on, and hence coined the term "The Globalization of Markets" (HBR May/June 1983). And also already twenty years ago, and not in the late nineties when CRM became the new management buzz word of the masses, did Professor Levitt discover and write about Relationship Management – "After the Sale is Over"(HBR Sep/Oct 1983) – as a "special field all its own", foreseeing that "the future will be a future of more intensified relationships, especially in industrial marketing, but also increasingly even in frequently purchased consumer goods."
As a critic once wrote: "One cannot read Ted Levitt without coming away feeling two things about marketing: first, that it's the most important of the business disciplines; second, that it's far and away the most fun." Quite so.
