Entries are in alphabetical order. The most-used tools have a dedicated article, covering how it’s done and the most common mistakes.
In brief
The vocabulary of marketing strategy, a few lines per term. Where there’s an article that goes deeper, you’ll find it next to the entry.
- PEST analysis
- Analysis of the external factors — political, economic, social, technological — that affect a market. It feeds the opportunities and threats of the SWOT.
- SWOT analysis
- A framework that organizes the strengths and weaknesses (internal) and the opportunities and threats (external) of a brand or a company. Read more →
- Business model
- The way a company creates, delivers and captures value: for whom, what it offers, how it gets there, how it makes money, what it costs. Read more →
- Category
- The set of products the customer considers alternatives to one another for the same need. Defining it well is the first step of positioning.
- Competitive intelligence
- Gathering, verifying and interpreting public, lawfully obtained information about competitors, customers and the market, in order to make better decisions. Read more →
- Go-to-market
- The plan by which a product reaches the market: for whom, with what proposition, at what price, through which channels, with what communication and on what timeline.
- Marketing mix
- The levers a company pulls in the market; in the classic form, the 4Ps: product, price, place (distribution), promotion.
- TOWS matrix
- Cross-matching the SWOT quadrants to derive strategies: strengths with opportunities, weaknesses with threats, and so on. Read more →
- Pricing
- Setting the price and its structure — tiers, discounts, subscriptions — based on perceived value, costs and competition.
- Value proposition
- The reason a customer should choose an offer: the problem it solves and the benefit it creates, better than the alternatives. Read more →
- Scenario planning
- Building several plausible futures for a market, to prepare strategies that hold up in each of them.
- Segmentation
- Dividing a market into groups of customers with similar needs and behaviors, to be served differently.
- White space
- An open position in a category that no competitor occupies. It’s a hypothesis to verify, not a guaranteed opportunity. Read more →
- Target
- The audience an offer or a piece of communication addresses first.
- Strategic validation
- Testing the assumptions a decision rests on before investing, against a criterion set in advance. Read more →
- Competitive advantage
- What allows a company to outperform competitors in a lasting way: costs, differentiation, relationships, capabilities that are hard to copy.
Written by the MAPS editorial team with the help of AI, checked and reviewed by the team.
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