Corporate and divisions strategic planning

All corporate headquarters undertake four planning activities:

1] Defining the corporate mission
2]Establishing strategic business units.
3]Assigning resources to each SBU.
4] Planning new businesses, downsizing older businesses.

Defining the corporate mission
Good mission statements have three major characteristics.
first, they focus on a limited number of goals.
second, mission, statements stress the major policies and values that the company wants to honor.
Third, they define the major competitive scopes within which the company will operate:
1)Industry scope
2)Products and application scope
3)competence scope
4)market-segment scope
5)vertical scope
6)geographical scope

Establishing strategic business units.
 An SBU has three characteristics:
1] It is a single business or collection of related business that can be planned separately from the rest of the company.
2] It has its own set of competitors.
3]It has a manager who is responsible for strategic planning and profit performance and who controls most of the factors affecting profit.


Assigning resources to each SBU
The Boston consultancy group approach
According to this approach the growth-share matrix is divided into four cells, each indicating a different type of business:
1]question marks
2]stars
3]cash cows
4]dogs.

 Planning new businesses, downsizing older businesses.
planning new business have three options, they are:
1]Intensive growth opportunity.
2]Integrative growth opportunity.
3]Diversification growth opportunity.

Relationship marketing: The key

We need to distinguish five different levels of investment in customer-relationship building:

1]Basic marketing: The salesmen simply sells the product

2]Reactive marketing: The salesmen sells the product and encourages the customer to call if he/she has questions, comments, or complaints.

3]Accountable marketing: The salesperson phones the customer a short time after the sale to check whether the product is meeting expectations.The salesmen also asks the customer for any product or service-improvement suggestions and any specific disappointments.This information helps the company continuously
improve its performance.

4]Proactive marketing:  The company salesperson contacts the customer from time to time with suggestions about improved product uses or helpful new products.

5]Partnership marketing: The company works continuously with the customer to discover ways to perform better.( General Electric has stationed some of its engineers full time at Praxair. Inc to help boost Praxair's productivity)