CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
To achieve a set of organizational goals and objectives, companies conceptualize, design, and implement various strategies. These strategies can be corporate, business, or functional. Marketing strategies constitute one of the functional strategies amenable to application by contemporary companies in order to enhance performance. Marketing has been defined and conceptualized in various ways, depending on the author’s background, interest, and education. For example, marketing can be seen as a matrix of business activities organized to plan, produce, price, promote, distribute, and market goods, service, and ideas for the satisfaction of relevant customers and clients. marketing strategy is important for the success of any organization, whether service- or product-oriented. Marketing strategy is a method by which a firm attempting to reach its target market uses to attract customers. Marketing strategy starts with market research, in which needs, attitudes and competitor’s products are assessed and the firm concentrate its limited resources on the greatest opportunities to increase sales and achieve a sustainable competitive advantage (Nymous, 2006).Marketing strategy must focus on delivering greater value to customers and the firm at a lower cost however quantifying the return on investment from marketing expenditure on activities such as advertising, promotion and distribution is one of the most complex issue facing decision makers. Marketing performance is central to success in today’s fast moving competitive markets, and measuring marketing performance is critical to managing it effective (Chiliya, 2009). In order to measure marketing strategy effectiveness, a business has to break down its marketing function into constituent parts, along with a mechanism through which to analyse the interaction between those parts. By doing this, decision-makers will finally be in a position to relate marketing expenses to shareholder value and to understand how to tie marketing initiatives back into the value created for the company. Decision-makers will be able to understand the internal motives that propel the marketing value of the business. The manipulation of the following marketing variables namely price variation and price promotion, research, advertising, product differentiation, quality, packaging and place will yield in-creased returns for firms. Marketing strategies in commercial banks serve as the fundamental component of marketing plans designed to fill market needs and reach marketing objective. Marketing strategy involves careful scanning of the internal and external environments. Internal environmental factors include marketing mix, plus performance analysis and strategic constraints. While external environmental factors include customer analysis, competitive analysis target market analysis as well as evaluation of the element of technological, economic, cultural or political/legal environment likely to impact success. Marketing strategy in commercial banks in Nigeria is basically designed to direct the flow of banking services profitably to target customers. The need for an effective marketing strategy stems from intense competition, not just from bank but other financial organization. Therefore banks strategize there marketing to create customer value as well as to establish customers need and to provide such needs in order to add more value to their service and gain competitive advantage. However, there are challenges in measuring marketing strategies in relation to productivity. Indeed several researchers indicate that there is a gab in this regard (okoh, 2009). It is against this, that the researcher considered the subject matter as a problem worthy of investigation.
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
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