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Implementation of the Strategic Marketing Plan
Of course, no matter how sound the mission statement or how specific the objectives and strategies may be, the most important aspect of the strategic marketing process is the implementation of the plan.
A significant problem in the implementation phase of market planning arises when strategies are given up too soon. For instance, a young general manager of a large downtown hotel in one of the slower growth regions of the United States instituted a weekend plan. Two weeks later, he called his advertising agency to cancel the program because the volume of business generated during the first weekend did not pay for the ad, and the second weekend saw only a slight improvement in volume. Worse still, this same general manager (who viewed himself as quite a marketer) was hired years later to open a hotel, and eight months prior to its opening still did not have a mission statement. Needless to say, the hotel had a difficult opening and the general manager learned the value of planning well in advance. Strategies simply cannot be worked out overnight.
Wise marketers in the hotel industry know that if a strategy is broad enough and well developed enough to result in needed large-scale changes, its implementation (or the "tactical" phase of the strategy) will be measured in years rather than in days. Therefore, it is important to have strategies to achieve massive, long-term objectives and, at the same time, tactics for meeting rather limited, short-term objectives. Strategies remain relatively constant over time while tactics are quite flexible. It is important not to confuse the two.
One of the dangers of strategic planning in any industry is the tendency for the manager to hold to his or her own particular plan to the exclusion of all other possibilities. While the successful manager's pride of authorship is understandable, there are times when even a successful strategy must be altered and a property's priorities rearranged. For instance, the strategy may have worked as well as anticipated in the past but now the need may have increased. On the other hand, the strategy may be working but achieving less success than anticipated.
For example, a hotel may be using perfectly adequate tactics to achieve the objective of developing business from the national association market. However, this objective and the tactics which correspond to it constitute only one part of an overall plan. It may turn out that another market segment, which management projected to be strong, is delivering less business than originally anticipated. In this case, the hotel would need to do even more business in the convention market to offset shortfalls elsewhere, and the successful convention component of the strategy would need to be revised.
Finally, a strategy may have outlasted its useful life. Some hotels that do an excellent job of developing a mission statement, projecting a strategic plan, and implementing it, make the mistake of staying with their program long after it can reasonably be expected to succeed. Hotels that are "stuck in a rut" may find that their strategies are working against rather than contributing to their continued success.
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