Strategic Marketing for Microfinance Institutions (Study)

This paper discusses strategic marketing framework developed by TMS financial services and MicroSave. It highlights the need for MFIs to move from product-orientation to market-orientation in order to offer client-responsive services and to be profitable.

The paper elaborates strategic marketing framework as comprising of three legs:

• Corporate brand strategy to:
  • Build a corporate brand;
  • Create corporate identity;
  • Communicate the same to the public.
• Product strategy to:
  • Modify the existing products or design new ones to suit the needs of the target clientele;
  • Position, price and market the products to optimize profits.
• Product delivery and customer service strategy to:
  • Motivate and build the capacity of staff to increase their efficiency;
  • Optimize the delivery processes;
  • Employ technology to increase efficiency;
  • Develop infrastructure to enable access to its services for the customers.

The paper also presents four sources that provide requisite information related to the above-mentioned strategies for MFIs:

• Market analysis for assessing the current and potential market;
• Competitor analysis for giving insights regarding the competitors;
• Customer analysis for gauging customer satisfaction and needs;
• PEST analysis for examining the political, economic, social and technological environment within which the MFI operates.

Finally, the paper concludes by demonstrating the positive impact of market-orientation on some of the sample MFIs' performance.