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Strategic Marketing Management Sample Exam Questions Question 1: a. Is the PLC (Product life cycle) concept useful in developing Marketing strategies? Describe why or why not? What are the limitations of the PLC concept? A strategy is a fundamental pattern of present and planned objectives, resource deployments, and interactions of an organisation with markets, competitors and other environmental factors. b. What are the advantages available to Google with their Google maps (as a Pioneer firm) in the Internet search engine market?
What are the advantages available to any of the follower firms in the market? c. Under what conditions to pioneer and follower strategies each have the greatest probability of long-term success? Question 2: a. Explain the term ‘sustainable competitive advantage’ b. Discuss five (5) differentiation and five (5) overall cost leadership strategies a firm can pursuer to create sustainable competitive advantages c. What are four (4) different types of businesses based on their intended rate of product-market development as proposed by Miles and Snow? d.
You are the marketing manager for a generic products division of a major pharmaceutical manufacturer. Your division is a low-cost defender that maintains its position in the generic drug market by holding down its costs and selling generic products to distributors and pharmacies at very low prices. What are the implications of this business strategy for each of the 4Ps in the strategic marketing programme you would develop for your division? Question 3: a. What is market orientation? What are the advantages and drawbacks of being ‘market oriented’ for a firm like Qantas Airways?
Lecture 1: Market orientation is implementing a more customer-focused approach to marketing. This involves companies that make what they can sell as opposed to selling what they can make. Market oriented companies have a broad product line and base their pricing on perceived benefits provided as opposed to production and distribution costs as Product oriented firms do. Their research is focused on identifying new opportunities and applying new technology to satisfy customer needs as opposed to product improvement and cost cutting solutions like product oriented firms.
Such companies design packaging for customer convenience and use it as a promotional tool rather than to merely protect the product or reduce costs involved and they emphasise their promotion on product benefits and ability to satisfy customer needs or solve problems (as opposed to product features, quality and price). Advantages include… b. Discuss the factors that mediate a marketing’s strategic role within an organisation Lecture 1: Competitive factors affect a firms market orientation Influence of different development stages across industries and global markets Strategic Inertia . Outline the major levels of strategy in most large, multi-product organisations Lecture 1: 1. Corporate Strategy: Decisions about the organisation’s scope and resource deployments across its divisions or businesses 2. Business-level strategy: How a business unit competes within its industry 3. Marketing strategy (Functional) Effective allocation and coordination of marketing resources and activities d. List the five components of a well-developed strategy. Lecture 1: 1. Scope (breadth of the strategic domain) 2. Goals and Objectives (What is to be accomplished) 3.
Resource deployments (Allocation of limited resources) 4. Identification of sustainable competitive advantage (How the organisation will compete) 5. Synergy (Whole greater than the sum of parts) Question 5: Apple computer’s iPods holds a commanding share of the rapidly growing global market for digital music players. To maintain its lead as the market continues to grow, what strategic marketing objectives should Apple focus on and why? Which specific marketing actions would you recommend for accomplishing Apple’s objectives?
Be specific with regard to each of the 4Ps in the firm’s marketing programme. Question 6. While we have seen that a business may have a number of other strategic options, the conventional wisdom suggests that a declining business should either be divested or harvested for maximum cash flow. Under what kinds of market and competitive conditions do each of these two conventional strategies make good sense? What kinds of marketing actions are typically involved in successfully implementing a harvesting strategy?