Utilizing the Strategic Marketing Organization

Book excerpt: Here is a hands-on guide to the new concept of the strategic marketing organization (SMO). Utilizing the Strategic Marketing Organization presents new insight into business-to-business marketing by introducing the reader to the SMO. The purpose of an SMO is to perpetuate and improve the business of the company by which it was hired. This book discusses key components and benefits of SMOs while relating directly to readers’problems and offering real-time solutions. Reading this guide and implementing its strategies will save money, expand market share, establish brand name, and create final bid presence as businesses learn how to choose the right SMO. They will also discover the advantages of using the SMO to determine the best program to promote the business and make it prosper, within budgetary confines. In Utilizing the Strategic Marketing Organization, the SMO is revealed as the “hired gun” that is not a traditional briefcase-in-hand consultant, an ad agency that makes pretty pictures, or an internal desktop publishing department that puts snowflakes on the company's newsletter. The powerful SMO is contrasted with the dwindling ability of the traditional advertising agency to meet real-time needs, particularly in the fast-changing business-to-business marketplace. Readers will find in this book how an SMO meets their needs for shrewd direction and fast action. Author James Stanco gives readers a reliable, reproducible format to aid in long- and short-range strategic/tactical planning, one that is flexible enough to target special opportunities and versatile enough to keep it all going in the right direction. User-friendly and easy-to-read, this book includes two in-depth, fictional case studies of how SMOs work which enhance readers’understanding of what SMOs really are and what they do. Some of the specific areas chapters discuss are customer tailoring vs. custom tailoring traditional marketing choices and why they don't work to desktop or not to desktop questions to ask when selecting the right marketing avenue common pitfalls of selecting a marketing avenue Utilizing the Strategic Marketing Organization is a vital resource for individuals concerned with their businesses, small or large, who want to exhibit greater growth, profitability, and control. The author discusses features of the SMO concept, but he features time- and money-saving benefits for all involved in or with a business venture--novice and expert owners, operators, promoters, marketers, sales managers, PR people, and agency personnel.