Scorpio “The Strategic Spine

SCORPIO

“THE STRATEGIC SPINE”

By John M Mapulanga PhD

Strategic Marketing planning has changed over a period of time, according to fundaments in the market. One thing that remains true to this strategic planning process are the five pillars that are constant. In my Marketing Practice, I have observed the persistence of clear mission, goals and objectives. The internal and external analysis is also vital though others would prefer the SWOT Analysis. Targeting is prominent with required resources, then metrices that can be measured. Further still, almost everyone has seen a company balance sheet or been part of an annual review that gives updates on the organization’s financial health. But not as many people are familiar with how success is determined without focusing on non-finances such as SCORPIO.

When properly constructed, non-financial KPIs are specific, measurable, and ladder up to the organization’s big-picture strategy. Team members can see exactly what they need to do to hit their goals and they also understand why they need to pull the same report every month or how their attendance rates lead to productivity. There’s a clear connection between daily tasks and strategic direction. In this case therefore, you can understand that there are areas of concern in the process and need to be managed as efficiently and effectively as possible to get maximum output. The major thrust is to see improved customer interaction

and sustainability to promote retention, solidify the bottomline, manage resources prudently and provide leadership in the market. These should be categorical in the process when crafting the plan, you should be clear of the assumptions that should be backed with data. Unrealistic plotting might spell a disaster during implementation and throw business to the wind. Understandably, marketing tactics should come into play, with clear mission, goals and objectives. So doing you should have the marketing mix in your mind. This coupled with proper identification of distribution channel

In sharing this consequently, I would like to draw your attention to one of the nonfinancial monitoring tools called the concept of SCORPIO. Paul Fifield, in his book Marketing Strategy Masterclass, introduced the concept of SCORPIO as a strategic coordination and monitoring tool. These are acronyms for; Segmentation,

Customer, organization, Retention, Positioning and brand, Industry and Market and

Offering. This tool ensures that the business maximizes potential and its revenue, the tool has seven elements for monitoring purposes and these are: market opportunities, market assessment, market awareness, market planning, market stimulation, sales strategy and customer services. The manager needs to constantly plot and monitor what is required to get the benefits of this tool. (Fifield 2008) See Illustration 1 This tool is best used to monitor non-financial indicators: Market Share, growth, Competitive advantage, Competitive position, Sales values, Market penetration, New product development, Customer satisfaction, customer retention, Customer franchise, Market image and awareness. These are non-financial indicators, which are intangible, that makes you have an insight into the performance of the company. Fascinatingly, these indicators do not take a quantitively character of business result metrics of the bottom-line report. The interesting nature about the non-financial indicators are that there can deep-drive you into understanding why certain financial metrics performed poorly.

Certainly, there are obvious non-financial indicators that

should always be on check. company reputation, customer influence and value, innovation. To have it right in the marketing organization, you need to have right measurements metrices which can empower your organization to positively impact your customer value and business growth, customer acquisition with winning rates and sales pipeline value. That’s why SCORPIO remains one of the most important non-financial metric measuring tools.

Business Model - SCORPIO - Connect, Fifield (2008)