Methodological principles of coordinating marketing and logistic strategies at trade enterprise

Functional strategies of logistics and marketing are parts of the enterprise's business strategy. The marketing strategy is developed separately from the logistic strategy, which leads to non-optimal business strategies. The present article is devoted to the problem of opposite runs between logistics and marketing. The article introduces concepts of responsive and effective business strategies. The extent of dependence of the logistic strategy on the marketing one determines a responsivity/efficiency ratio for the company's business strategy. The aim of the research is to create the system of methodological principles for developing the balanced business strategy, in coordination with functional strategies of the enterprise's marketing and logistics. In order to achieve the aim, at the first stage, it is essential to develop basic requirements for the customer service of trading companies, i. e. availability, functionality, reliability. Qualitative requirements of consumers are converted into quantitative indices, reflecting the satisfaction of clients' basic needs, values of which are estimated in extreme conditions of the company – at implementing extremely responsive and effective business strategies. The next stage is transformation of quantitative indices of clients' requirements to quantitative indices of the logistic system and estimation of their values at implementing responsive and effective business strategies. At the third stage, estimates of the logistic system indicators are balanced. The research established connection between qualitative basic requirements of consumers, their quantitative indices and quantitative indices of the logistic system at a trade enterprise. Limits of changes for quantitative indices of consumer requirements and the logistic system are determined. The authors offer the methodological principles of developing the business strategy in coordination with functional strategies of marketing and logistics, on the basis of balancing the estimates of the logistic system indicators. Problems of estimating reliability for each of the considered business strategies and the optimality of the balanced business strategy remain unresolved. Reliability estimation depends on a category of customers at a particular company. Optimality estimation of the balanced business strategy is necessary to develop the appropriate technique.