The study and application of Marketing Strategy therefore reflects a basic dilemma. The key
demand in terms of application is to address the causes of individual firm or unit success in the competitive marketplace yet we can be reasonably confident from a theoretical perspective that such knowledge is not systematically available because of the nature of the competitive process itself. In this way, the academic study of marketing strategy remains open to the challenge that it is not relevant to marketing practice. Yet to represent the problem solely in this way is to privilege one particular notion of the nature and use of academic research in marketing as well as the relationship between research and practice.44 Recognizing the limits to
our knowledge in marketing strategy may also help in a constructive way to define what can and cannot be achieved by more investigation and research.
There are a number of areas in which we can both improve our level of knowledge and provide some guidance and assistance in the development of strategy. First, we can identify some of the generic patterns in the process of market evolution that give some guidance as to how we might think about and frame appropriate questions to be asked in the development of marketing strategy. Such questions would be added to those we are used to using in any marketing management context such as the nature of the (economic) value added to the customer based on market research evidence and analysis. It has been suggested in strategy that such additional questions are most usefully framed around questions of imitation and sustainability but, rather as Dickinson (1992) argues,45this really
assumes sustainability is a serious option. It may be more appropriate to frame such additional ques- tions around the more general patterns of market evolution: standardization, maturity of technology, stability of current networks rather than attempt to address the unanswerable question of sustainabil- ity directly.
When it comes to the generics of success, we face an even greater problem. By definition, any
The basics of marketing strategy 75
44The issue of the relationship between theory and
practice, and the notion of relevance as the intermediary construct between the two is of course itself both problematic in general (Brownlie, 1998) as well as open to a range of further critical question particularly with respect to the institutional structures that have been developed and sus- tained on the assumption of the divide itself (Wensley, 1997c, 2007) and therefore at some level represent interest in main- taining the divide but in the name of bridging it!
45Of course such a view about sustainability is also very
much in tune with both Schumpeterian views about the nature of economic innovation and the general Austrian view about the nature of the economic system (Wensley, 1982; Jacobson, 1992).
approach which really depends on analysis of means or averages leaves us with a further dilemma: not only does any relative ‘usable’ explanation only provide us with a very partial picture where there is much unexplained rather than explained outcomes, but also the very notion of a publicly available ‘rule for success’ in a com- petitive market is itself contradictory except in the context of a possible temporary advantage.46 We
can try and resolve the problem by looking at the behaviour of what might be called successful out- liers but here we face a severe issue of interpret- ation. As we have seen, as we might expect the sources of such success are themselves ambigu- ous and often tautological: we end up often really asserting either then to be successful one needs to be successful or that the route to success is some ill-defined combination of innovation, effective- ness and good organization.
It may well be that the best we can do with such analysis is to map out the ways in which the variances of performance change in different market contexts: just like our finance colleagues we can do little more than identify the conditions under which variances in performance are likely to be greater and therefore through economic logic the average performance will increase to compensate for the higher risks.
Finally, we may need to recognize that the comfortable distinction between marketing man- agement, which has often been framed in terms of the more tactical side of marketing and market- ing strategy is not really sustainable. At one level all marketing actions are strategic: we have little knowledge as to how specific even brand choices at the detailed level impact or not on the broad development of a particular market so we are hardly in a position to label some choices as stra- tegic in this sense and others as not. On the other hand, the knowledge that we already have and are likely to develop in the context of the longer- term evolutionary patterns for competitive mar- kets will not really also enable us to engage directly with marketing managerial actions and choices at the level of the firm: the units of both analysis and description are likely to be different. In our search for a middle way which can inform individual practice, it may well be that some of the thinking tools and analogies that we have
already developed will prove useful but very much as means to an end rather than solutions in their own right.
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