The Three Cs Structure in Order to Define the Role of Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategy and planning is the key factor that enables a company to survive or even thrive by taking advantage of a company’s distinguish competitiveness, to manage its success in a certain market for a long run (McDonald, 2007). Thus, it is important for a company to put focus on both internal and external environments to develop its own strategies and plans (Wood, 2007, pp. 5-8). In this case, three Cs structure (i.e. Corporation, Competitor and Customer) gives a simple but thorough aspect to examine a company’s strength under the situation it stands (Jain, 1999).

In this essay, the venture project “Yumm” company will be taken as an example to discuss through the three Cs structure in order to define the role of marketing strategy and planning in a business. A conclusion will be drawn at the end.

The corporation “Yumm”

Yumm is a recipe platform combined with price comparison of food ingredients between five main supermarkets (e.g. ASDA, Sainsbury, Tesco), with a socializing environment for users to communicate on food topics. The business model is to earn from advertisements and free for members, thus providing best user experiences is its top priority. Therefore, when applying the SWOT analysis to portray the internal and external environment (Houben et al., 1999), Yumm tends to regard itself as a service provider and the strength includes “highly customer-oriented culture” that stresses on customers' involvement of co-creating the recipe content, which increase their perception of service quality and satisfaction toward Yumm (Alam, 2002).

On the other hand, the biggest weakness is the low capital requirement for its business concept, which forms a limited entry barrier (McAfee et al., 2004). However, the streng...

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