Strategic Marketing: Planning and Control, Third Edition

90 Strategic Marketing: Planning and Control

This chapter will explore aspects of an organisation’s capabilities, before

illustrating the component parts of an audit and the tools available to

The internal marketing audit

■ Organisational capabilities

In this chapter resources are defined as all the assets and competencies

to which the organisation has access. Assets are given a broad definition

to include both the tangible and intangible capital of the organisation.

Competencies are the skills that are contained within the organisation.

The application of these skills to effectively deploy the available assets,

delivers the organisation’s strategic capabilities in the market. Corporate

capabilities are therefore defined as the combination of assets and compe-

tencies that denote the organisation’s competitive capacity.

Establishing an organisation’s current and potential capabilities is there-

fore reliant upon an evaluation of two aspects of its resources: assets and

competencies.

■ Organisational assets

Organisational assets are the accumulated capital, both financial and non-

financial, that a company has at its disposal. These assets are both tangible

and intangible (Hooley et al., 1998) and include:

● Financial assets: such as working capital, or access/availability of

investment finance, and credit worthiness.

● Physical assets: ownership or control of facilities and property. In the

retail sector ownership of an outlet in a prime location could be a sig-

nificant asset.

● Operational assets: production plant, machinery and process technologies.

● People assets: the quantity of human resources available to the organ-

isation and the quality of this resource in terms of their background

and abilities.

● Legally enforceable assets: ownership of copyrights and patents, fran-

chise and licensing agreements.

● Systems: management information systems and databases and the gen-

eral infrastructure for supporting decision-making activities.

● Marketing assets: of particular concern in the development of market-

ing strategy are of course marketing assets. These marketing assets fall

into four main categories:

1 Customer-based assets

These are assets that the customer perceives as being important

such as:

❍Image and reputation: These relate to the company and the recog-

nition of its corporate identity.