by Kevin Pack

Created on: May 10, 2007   Last Updated: May 17, 2007

The best marketing strategies are those which are the cost effective and cost efficient at achieving the objectives they are designed to do. For this reason, the best marketing strategies are difficult to define in specific terms. For example, if your goal is to increase awareness of a new product, various promotions, advertisements, demonstrations, and a variety of other tactics might be appropriate. If your goal is to increase sales, purchasing incentives, product association and product generalization techniques, as well as product differentiation tactics may be effective. If the objective of the marketing campaign is to increase awareness or sales across the brand, or develop a brand image, product differentiation, emphasis on core competencies, low cost leadership, product development, and all other strategies that contribute to the uniqueness of a brand may be used as the base of a campaign.

The above strategies, especially regarding brand development can clearly not all be incorporated in the campaign for the obvious reason that certain messages contradict each other. This is especially true when targeting a specific demographic or market. Taking the various objectives of marketing campaigns into consideration, in order to determine what the best marketing strategy is, it must first be determined what the strategy is designed to do. In other words, as discussed in detail in the book "What Sticks", the marketing team must agree on their definition of success. That being said, although some campaigns are targeted for broader markets then others, specific strategies towards specific target markets may be the most effective for a variety of reasons. This is not to say that the target market can not be big or even vague in terms of demographics. This simply means that marketing strategies should have specific purposes rather then be random and often costly tactics to gain exposure with and leave the company hoping for results.

These strategies have certain qualities. For one, they should be measurable. This is to establish criteria of tactics that work and tactics that fail with regards to a given goal. This will allow future campaigns to work with greater insight when working on future campaigns with regards to effective techniques. This will inevitably save the company money on research, trials, and failed campaigns as well as time, man power in some cases, and will minimize risk. Again, as noted in the book "What Sticks", in order for a strategy to be truly

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