The marketing decision process - marketing auditing

Marketing is very much about making decisions which are inter-related, and there seems to be four factors which influence success.

Clearly, it is important to set up a hierarchy of decision making which puts each decision area in an appropriate order, and this is the marketing decision process.

The process is composed by the marketing mix:

Objectives should be translated into annual targets and, consequently, business planning. To meet the master plan it is important for the firm to match its strengths to opportunities in the market place. In effect, the marketing planning cycle is showed in fig. X below

To structure the decision making, marketers use marketing audit systems which provide a thorough examination of a business’s marketing environment, objectives, strategies and activities with a view to identifying key strategic issues, problem areas, and opportunities. As such, the marketing audit provides answers to the questions:

Where are we now?

How did we get there?

Where are we heading?

Answers to the questions can be found both internally in the firm but is also a consequence of external factors. The auditing process is therefore divided into internal and external auditing.