Bottom-Up Marketing Strategy
The higher you go up the corporate ladder, the more likely you are to be considered among the power centers of a company. Marketing departments in a large company traditionally rely on the upper-management power center to issue the overall strategy while middle managers are left to decide upon the tactics to carry it out. This is known as top-down marketing, and an increasing number marketing gurus claim it's a model that has no business in today's rapid, global marketplace.
Other People Are Reading
-
Basics
-
Bottom-up marketing models begin with one or more tactics and let the strategy develop from there. The key is to analyze the point at which the product meets the consumer and learn from the responses. It is sometimes called "improvisational marketing" because it requires a nimble department capable of responding to consumer activity and product performance rather than a scripted approach developed top-down before a product even hits the market.
Application
-
Al Reis and Jack Trout, authors of "Bottom-up Marketing Strategies," offer Vicks, maker of assorted cold and cough medicines, as an example of the model in action. Vicks developed a cough medicine that just happened to make people fall asleep. Had the company relied on a pre-scripted top-down approach, it may have missed this connection in its materials and approach. Instead, it used the tactic -- Vicks NyQuil causes drowsiness -- to develop the strategy. NyQuil became the "first nighttime cold medicine," a niche that previously didn't exist, and one that Vicks still dominates today.
-
Traditional Approach
-
When business moves at the speed of the Internet, companies large and small miss opportunities if they're too beholden to the top-down, scripted plan. They are also less able to respond to competitor forces unforeseen at the time the plan was created. Additionally top-level managers might sometimes outline a strategy that is difficult to implement, resulting in middle managers who deploy multiple tactics in an effort to carry out the strategy. The result is a diffusion of effort and an array of tactics launched with insufficient resources.
Blended Approach
-
F. Trompenaars and P. Woolliams argue in their book, "Marketing Across Cultures," that the bottom-up movement simply replaces one extreme with another. Neither an exclusively top-down approach nor a solely bottom-up approach is sufficient on its own, they contend. If a tactic fails to yield a coherent strategy, the bottom-up approach has failed. Similarly, if the strategy fails to acknowledge or respond to forces on the ground, it has failed. Trompenaars and Wooliams believe that a symbiotic relationship exists between the tactics and the strategy. Either way, it is the interplay between tactics and strategy that matters, not the starting point, according to the authors.
-
References
- Photo Credit business colleagues preparing for business meeting image by Vladimir Melnik from Fotolia.com
