Sushil Kumar
July 17, 2006 Marketing Audit Approach
"A marketing audit is a comprehensive, systematic examination of a company's marketing organization, strategies, tactics, objectives, and activities. A marketing audit enables senior management to discover the organization's strengths and weaknesses in relation to opportunities and threats it faces in the marketplace, and pinpoint more effective uses for the available marketing resources" (Willson, 2003).
"Half the money you spend on marketing is wasted. The trouble is: you don't know which half." (William Lever founder of Lever Brothers, 1885 now Unilever PLC) Most companies wait until they see their sales and profits decline before they launch an examination of their marketing efforts and, by this time, they are scrambling for solutions. The best time to prepare for a potential downturn in sales is before it happens, while management can still act to maintain the company's hard won gains.
The goal for this document is to outline the evaluation of current environment, target market, customers, competition, services, and marketing strategies to be used to develop a marketing audit plan for ChaiNet, a hypothetical company in the business of cyber café. The resources, approach, and steps of the marketing audit will also be discussed. "The marketing audit will be used as a fundamental part of the marketing planning process. It will be conducted not only at the beginning of the process, but also at a series of points during the implementation of the plan. The marketing audit will consider both internal and external influences on marketing planning, as well as a review of the plan itself (Marketing Teacher, 2006)." The marketing audit plan will be used to make the sales goals outlined in the ChaiNet business plan a reality in the year 2007.
ChaiNet, unlike a typical cafe, provides a unique forum for communication and entertainment through the medium of the Internet. ChaiNet is