Marketing Audit in Theory and Practise

World today is full of great and big changes that have an inevitable impacts and influence on business climate and situation. The business environment is very dynamic, highly competitive, fluctuant and strongly interdependent. All trends and factors can be perceived as risk and uncertainty. On one hand it may bring attractive chances with positive effects but it can also bring big failure and loss. Marketing audit as a comprehensive, systematic, independent and periodic review of environment, objectives, strategies and activities of the company to identify its problems and opportunities, as well as preparation of plans to improve the marketing performance of companies, is an important element that can help companies face all these challenges and that is also the reason I was motivated to further analyze and work with this topic. There is no magical recipe for business success that works in every case but marketing audit is one of the indispensable components of the marketing instrumentarium and to be able to maximize its effect, it is necessary to know the conditions of its application, its capabilities, basic rules of use and procedures. It is an important tool that can help companies in their never ending war with competitors which was also one of the reasons I find this area interesting and worth to study deeper than usual.

I am certain that theory and practice are an integral part of one whole, one can not successfully exist without the other. We have to accept that they create a synergistic component that has to be examined and observed simultaneously.

The main incentive to work on this topic was my personal belief that marketing audit is one of the keys that can provide a systematic and balanced business growth. Getting to know all its characteristics and formal aspects in detail and watch its practical application was the biggest inspiration for continuous and in-depth work on my dissertation thesis.

The primary objective of the scientific part of the dissertation thesis is to create a coherent and comprehensive theoretical unit, which would synthesize the basic and specific areas of selected issues. The most important resources should be mainly foreign publications and websites of foreign companies engaged in the marketing audit in order to enrich Slovak theoretical works, which deal with the chosen theme to a lesser extent. Priority areas which will receive attention are:

* The fundamentals and importance of the marketing audit.

* The process of marketing audit.

* The areas of marketing audit.

* The objectives of marketing audit.

* Basic dimensions of marketing audit.

* Tools and methods of marketing audit.

* Attitudes towards marketing audit.

* The