A marketing audit is a useful instrument to assist a corporation to establish its unique competitive position and to spot its superior skills, resources and capabilities. This is often a prerequisite for achieving a sustainable competitive advantage for your product, business unit and/or business.
Conducting a marketing audit is one among the most effective and most sensible choices an entrepreneur and businessman (or -girls!) will make.
What is a promoting audit?
Philip Kotler describes a marketing audit as a -
o comprehensive,
o systematic,
o freelance, and
o periodic examination of a corporation's or business unit's selling setting, objectives, methods, and activities with a read to identifying problem areas (and opportunities) and recommending a arrange of action to enhance the organization's promoting performance.
The definition clearly confirms the strategic and operational relevance of a selling audit, creating it an imperative analysis instrument - dissecting, analyzing, assessing, proposing, and advising.
About the audit process
The audit method ought to be thoroughly planned thus that auditing time and cost are kept to a minimum, since ending a selling audit will be quite expensive. It is sometimes done by highly skilled, experienced, and specialized marketing professionals. Kotler's cardinal rule when conducting an audit is: "Do not rely solely on the organization's managers for information and opinions. Staff, customers, retailers, agents, and other stakeholders must conjointly be interviewed and be concerned in the process."
Asking the "right" questions is in actual truth the key to conducting a successful selling audit. Questions unlock a personal's or a cluster's inventive instincts and serve to stimulate the thought processes. If the correct questions are asked in the right manner, refreshingly new promoting insights and ideas return to the fore.
The selling audit also provides the auditor with a clearer image of the organization's marketing function and business environment. It can facilitate him/her to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of an organization's internal and external (marketing) environment.
Some final thoughts
Not like a money audit, a selling audit includes a robust dualistic character. On the one hand it has a scientific and structured aspect, and on the opposite hand it has a "chaos" facet that invitations and provokes intuitive, inventive and "out-of-the-box" thinking.
I feel that the promoting audit process ought to encourage "out-of-the-box" thinking, since competitive advantage rarely comes from sameness. When businesses offer the same product and service to the same market by performing the identical kind of activities no business will prosper in the long run. Data obtained from a radical and skillfully conducted selling audit can enable management to develop a market focused strategy that is directed by its unique capabilities, guaranteeing sustainable competitive advantage for their product, business unit and/or business.
Lastly, the promoting audit plays an important role in developing a (successful) strategic promoting plan. A well conducted marketing audit will offer corporate and marketing decision-makers with quality data that is relevant, sensible and constructive. As a strategic instrument, the promoting audit is indispensable when developing a selling strategy.
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Aaron R Daniel has been writing articles online for nearly 2 years now. Not only does this author specialize in Marketing, you can also check out his latest website about:
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