carried out for a specific program (e.g. a sales or advertising campaign of a few weeks duration) or carried out annually. Strategic plans typically include a statement of the firm's vision and mission. The Marketing strategy is a plan that shows how the firm's marketing activities will help to achieve the overall strategic goals. Marketing management is focused on developing the marketing program or Marketing mix (also known as the 4Ps) and is concerned with the implementation of specific action plans designed to achieve objective, measurable targets (SMART objectives). Marketing management plans are typically prepared on an annual planning cycle, but may be prepared for shorter periods for special events such as a product launch, a new logo, change to corporate livery or a repositioning campaign. Strategic planning tools and techniques Strategic planning requires sophisticated research and analysis to document the firm's current situation as well as to identify opportunities with the potential to be developed. Strategic research methods Strategic research is primarily concerned with the identification of new business opportunities and threats, which derive from the external operating environment. Accordingly, strategic analysts rely less on traditional market research methods. Instead, they use methods such as: Environmental scanning; Marketing intelligence (also known as competitive intelligence) and Futures research Strategic analysis methods Marketers draw on a very wide variety of techniques and tools when analyzing the market and the broader operating conditions. The technique selected depends on the nature of the situation or problem to be investigated and the analyst's skill and experience. Strategic analysts employ some 200 different quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques including: Brand Development Index (BDI); Category development index (CDI); Brand/ Category penetration; Benchmarking; Blind spot analysis; Functional capability and resource analysis; Impact analysis; Counterfactual analysis; Demand analysis; Emerging Issues Analysis; Experience curve analysis; Gap analysis; impact analysis; se Analysis (also known as Porter's five forces analysis); Management profiling; Market segmentation analysis; Market share analysis; Market Segmentation analysis; Perceptual mapping; PEST analysis or its variants including PESTLE, STEEPLED and STEER; Portfolio analysis, such as BCG growth-share matrix or GE business screen matrix; Positioning analysis; Precursor Analysis or Evolutionary analysis; Product life cycle analysis and S-curve analysis (also known as technology life cycle or hype cycle analysis); Product evolutionary cycle analysis; Scenario analysis; Segment Share Analysis; Situation analysis; Strategic Group Analysis; SWOT analysis; Trend Analysis; Value chain analysis Marketing strategies Barriers to entry Barriers to exit Market dominance strategies