Role of Marketing in IKEA

Strategic Marketing

Contents
1. Understand the principles of marketing and its role in business practice............................3
1.1 Evaluate the role of marketing in an organisation..........................................................3
1.2 Analyse the relationship between corporate strategy and marketing strategy.............3
1.3 Explain how marketing strategy is developed.................................................................4
2. Be able to evaluate approaches to marketing analysis...........................................................5
2.1 Evaluate various approaches to internal environmental analysis...................................5
2.2 Evaluate various approaches to external environmental analysis..................................6
2.3 Explain how internal and external analyses can be integrated to devise strategic
alternatives............................................................................................................................8
3. Be able to apply strategic marketing decisions and choices.................................................8
3.1 Justify decisions and choices to be made at a corporate level........................................8
3.2 Assess how these decisions influence marketing at business unit and functional level. 9
3.3 Evaluate approaches to competitive positioning of businesses......................................9
4. Be able to evaluate the use of marketing strategies for competitive advantage...............10
4.1 Summarise a range of strategies that can contribute to competitive advantage.........10
4.2 Assess marketing strategies, their application and implementation for an organisation.
..............................................................................................................................................11
4.3 Evaluate marketing strategies for an organisation........................................................12
References................................................................................................................................13

1. Understand the principles of marketing and its role in
business practice.
1.1 Evaluate the role of marketing in an organisation.
Marketing plays a very important role in case of IKEA. It is a big reason of getting the
customers know about the concept and quality products of the brand. Role of Marketing in
IKEA is as follows-
1. Fulfil consumer requirements- Marketing helps IKEA in finding out the customer’s
requirement and create marketing strategies accordingly. Consumer needs depend
upon the individual as well as cultural personalities.
2. Helps in growth and survival- Survival of every business depends upon the retention
on customers so marketing is very important for IKEA to achieve the goals as it is
customer- focused.
3. Widens market- Most of the marketers utilize communication tools like sales,
advertising, event marketing in order to promote the products. So, marketing helps
in creating and protect the brand image. Today there is a high technological
advancement and interactive methods of marketing.
4. Setting right prices- Price is a very important element that helps in retaining the
customer and with the help of marketing strategies, IKEA is able to set fair prices of
the products.

5. Better products- It is important to do marketing of the products because people are
not aware about all the products offered by IKEA. Marketing also helps in design and
manage the products.
6. Competition- There is a very high competition in the market and marketing enables
IKEA in maintaining a balance between the customer’s expectations and
competitor’s products.
7. Economic Growth- As marketing increases, demand for the products also get
increases. It results in industrial growth as well as increment in employment
opportunities. It also helps in raising living standard of the people.
1.2 Analyse the relationship between corporate strategy and
marketing strategy.
Globalization is one of the important trends that are in all the companies nowadays. It is
difficult to get market share in new country like Asia. IKEA’s has an effective strategic
management that basically helps in determining the sustain ability and competitive
advantage among competitors. IKEA’s corporate strategy comprises of the joint venture and
pricing strategies. IKEA has created its corporate strategy by offering high quality products
in low prices so that everyone can easily afford the same (Zabala-Iturriagagoitia, 2014). It is
very easy for the organization to get the customer base but everyone is not much aware
about product quality of IKEA. And some people think that low price equals to low quality.
IKEA provides an option of online order in which they deliver the products to the customers
without even charging delivery cost. They have very interesting designs that attracts
customers a lot.
IKEA has the same mission and vision and its vision statement is “To create a better
everyday life for the many people”. There is a relationship with the organizational vision and
business idea as their business idea supports the vision of providing a big range of home
furnishing products at very prices so that many people can afford the same. Mission of the
organization is not broad and it does not discuss about things like customers, products
culture and competition in the business (Lynch, 2018). According to IKEA, a vision or mission
should be strong enough to create business strategy and to provide assistance to the
managers in decision making and allocation of resources. Its mission statement suggests the
purpose of the organization and vision suggests the guidelines of moving the business to get