Ghana may need to adopt a Market ?Led Strategic management approach to Politics.

The customers in this market are the citizens of Ghana. The successful organisation (Being the Government) will be customer -focused not the product or technology focused, supported by a market ?information competence that links the voice of the customer to all the firm?s value ?delivery processes. Successful marketing organisation will have the skills necessary to manage multiple strategic marketing processes, many of which have not until recently, been assumed as within the sphere of marketing.

Does Ghana have such strategies in place?

The marketing concept and orientation

Organisational Culture: In marketing may be expressed by for example the set of values and beliefs that drives the organisation through a fundamental commitments to serving customers ?needs as the path to sustained profitability

Strategy: As strategy marketing seeks to develop effective response to changing market environments by defining market segments (various Governmental departments) and developing and positioning the product (a service for example the health service) offering for those target markets.

Tactics: Marketing as tactics is concerned with the day to day activities of products management pricing, distribution and marketing communications, such as advertising, personal selling, publicity and sales promotions.

The challenge of simultaneously building a customer orientation in an organisation (Culture of a Government) developing value propositions and competitive positioning (strategy) and developing detailed marketing action plans (tactics) is the massive and complex. It is perhaps unsurprising that the Organisation (Government) reality of marketing often falls short of these demands.

What should be the market ?led strategic approach then?

It might be worth using identifying the components of market orientation as:

Customer orientation-: understanding customers (Ghanaians public) well enough continuously to create superior value for them

Competitor orientation-: awareness of short term- and looking long term capabilities of the competitors

Interfunctional co-ordination-: using all company resources (Government) to create value for target customers (Ghanaians)

Organisation (Government) culture _: linking employee and managerial behaviour to customer (Ghanaian) satisfaction.

Long ?term profit focus -: as the overriding business objective.

The world is dynamic and for Ghana to be competitive we need to move with the time to satisfy the customer (Ghanaians in everywhere). Hence, a fundamental of strategy is crucial in a changing world.

This would involve a competitive positioning strategies, by being innovation, focusing on customers needs and looking with the community to find who the decision making units are, and involving the identified sectors to form a new decision making unit with the view of offering a superior service to customers.

Basic positioning strategies could applied, satisfy customers needs, wants and demands in all areas of the organisation (Government) and offer a value for money and satisfaction and quality. The customers would not settle for shoddy and unsafe products and any organisation need to tightly safeguard its customers. In this case Food Standard Board and other organisation applies the same principles explained earlier to focus on the customers (the Ghanaian Public)

Poor service to disadvantage customers (disabled persons, the elderly, children and psychiatric patients and the very poor within our society) Clearly, better marketing system must be built in low-income areas. One hope is to get large retailer to open outlet to cater for these groups of customers. Are the group who really need to have consumer protection (policies to protect them? E.g. the disability bill, domestic violence bill, child protection policy, elder abuse policy etc).

Factors to consider by any organisation in the market are as follows: -

The company?s macro environment

? consider the population size and trends,

? changing age structure,

? changing family,

? rising number of educated people

? increasing diversity

? income distribution and changes in purchasing power

? changing consumer spending patterns

? shortages of raw materials

? increased cost of energy

? increased pollution

? Government intervention in natural resource management

? Fast pace of technology change

? Whig R&D budgets

? Growth of public interest groups

? Increased emphasis on ethics and socially responsible actions.

? Persistence on cultural values

? Responding to the marketing environment

Organisations (Government) must constantly watch and adapt to the marketing environment in order to seek opportunities and ward off threats.

In order to effectively satisfy the customers (Ghanaians) any organisation need to look into its internal i.e. the micro environment (its departmental and managerial structures which affects marketing management decision making as well as other marketing intermediaries (resellers, physical distributions, financial intermediaries, marketing services agencies. The external i.e. the macro environment (meaning demographic, economic, natural, technology, political, and cultural forces.

Reflecting on Ghana we can passively accept the marketing environment as an uncontrollable element to which they must adapt, avoiding treats and taking advantage of the opportunities as they arises. Or Ghana could take an environmental management perspective and proactively working to change the environment by using strategies like ansoff, porters? five forces, and SWOT analysis etc rather than simply reacting to it.

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.