The Strategic Marketing Plan is the cornerstone of all Marketing activities. This Boot Camp focuses on the practical tools, techniques and processes for developing clear, distinctive and integrated strategic marketing plans that have buy-in throughout the organization. Participants reinforce their learning by documenting key elements of their plan including: business definition and scope, vision, business objectives, SWOT analysis, segmentation, positioning, marketing mix strategies by segment, key success factors and risks and contingency plans.

In the Boot Camp you will learn ‘how to’, apply what you learn to your business, and go back to the office with the core of a plan that you can apply immediately.

Strategic Marketing Boot Camp™ is being offered on May 8-10, 2006, at the Boston Newton Marriott, Newton, MA.

A simple question, but with a very complex answer.

Once upon a time, it was enough just to be doing marketing – attending industry conferences, sending out mailings, taking customers out to lunch, doing advertising and public relations. After all, you were active, busy, getting the word out, promoting the brand. But no longer. Today’s tightening cost pressures force you to measure the impact of each of your marketing initiatives, and maximize the return on every marketing dollar.

While marketing traditionally spoke in terms of what it does, the people funding marketing, be they the CEOs and / or CFOs, speak in terms of dollars and cents and the impact of expenditures on the bottom line. Marketing Return On Investment (ROI) is the intersection point between marketing and finance, allowing these two critical functions to speak a common language, and facilitating the marketing budgeting process.

Maximizing marketing ROI is not just beneficial for getting through the budgeting process with adequate funding. What has been happening increasingly is that while marketing objectives remain fixed, marketing budgets get slashed midway through the fiscal year. This shifts the burden of marketing ROI measurement and maximization squarely to the marketing side, and forces strict ‘self-policing’ of every marketing expenditure by the marketing function.

Jack Trout has been preaching marketing strategy for the last quarter century. He has made his name with straight, easy to relate to, practical and useful advice about marketing. His books, jointly written with his long time partner (now de-partnered) Al Reis have been best sellers. They include such classics as ‘Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind’, ‘Marketing Warfare’ and ‘The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing’.

If you've never read anything from Jack Trout before, this is the book to get! Some compare it to a ‘greatest hits album’. The book is essentially nuggets from his quarter century of writing all rolled up into one relatively short, easy reading package.

On the other hand, if you’ve read all of Trout’s previous books, you might feel slightly cheated due to the significant overlap with his previous work.

Trout’s explanations of marketing and strategy are gems, as are his discussions of positioning, differentiation, specialization, simplicity and leadership, which are a must-read for any strategist and marketing professional.

Trout on Strategy can be your refresher on everything he’s written. It is a great ‘nutshell’ version of his teachings. There's an awful lot of wisdom crammed into its pages. The book is not about new ideas; it is about the immutable ideas he has been preaching over the last quarter century.

We recommend this book due to its plentiful, valuable, practical and useful marketing and strategy insights.

View book on Amazon.com...

We keep receiving excellent feedback from people who have taken this quick, free (and confidential unless you elect to share the results with us) assessment on our website. Take the assessment to get a reading on the status of the market management function in your organization, with focus on market planning (leading to the availability of winning offerings) and product marketing (successfully marketing the offerings in your portfolio).

The ratings summary chart illustrates the implications of your assessment to the outlook of the business. How does your company rate? What are the implications? What actions can you / will you take to improve the marketing management function?