Strategy: The Name of the Game

In my current program of Digital Media Marketing at George Brown College, we get a chance to meet a marketing professional every week thanks to our professor Wendy Greenwood . Wendy helps us connect with these marketing professionals to get an insight into the industry which will help us get our first step in the corporate world, and this week’s guest speaker was Jennifer Stoll . Jennifer has been in the marketing industry for the past 2 decades and has reached soaring heights. Having graduated from Bucknell University she now works in Valtech. Jen started as a Strategy Director at Valtech and now holds the position of Vice President in Strategy.

In our meeting, Jen discussed how strategy plays a role in marketing. She discussed how strategic planning and execution of the associated tactics can give a company an upper hand against the competition. She discussed the process of planning a strategy and what factors come into play

·???????Market Research

·???????Synthesis of data

·???????Analysis

·???????Implementation

The process starts with conducting research on the market and its needs, followed by the collection and synthesis of data collected from the research. The data collected needs to be analysed to find any voids or gaps which need to be filled and after all the work a strategic idea needs to be implemented to capture the market share. Consequently content also needs to be strategized based on different factors such as channels, timing (seasonal content), hashtags, keywords etc and requires planning of the campaign.

Her insights on the strategy made me realize how this information would have benefited me when I was working as a freelancer and managing social media accounts. My work was solely based on planning the timeline of content by creating a content calendar and pushing out creative content in high frequencies with little focus given to hashtags, keywords content timing and content testing. Had I possessed the knowledge of strategic planning and process prior to starting my freelancer gig, I would have definitely come up with better results.

The first time when I actually used strategic planning and tactic implementation was in my previous program at George Brown College (Strategic Relationship Marketing) when I was making an IMC project to increase revenue for a brand called Peter &Paul’s Gifts based in Vaughn, On. This is where I followed the correct process of strategic planning and tactic implementation and surprisingly my results were greater than our expectations.

After the discussion, Jen prepared for us a case study which we had to solve. The case study was on the brand SC Johnson and its umbrella brands. We had to analyse and figure out whether creating brand sites for all of SC Johnson’s umbrella brands was a good strategy.

After a brief discussion with the team, we came to the conclusion that it's not a good strategy to create separate sites for each of SC Johnson’s brands as it may create competition among its own similar brands rather than focusing on the competition. A better solution was to create a shopping website for SC Johnson which features all its products. This would not only decrease the operational costs of the brand but also create more revenue as the brand would have higher selling margins.

In conclusion I would like to say that a career in strategic planning is something that really intrigues me as I believe strategic planning requires awareness and creative thinking and I would definitely consider it as a career path.