Marketing strategy
Marketing strategy refers to efforts undertaken by an organization to increase its sales and achieve competitive advantage.
Strategic marketing involves implementing policies that boost a business’s competitive position while addressing challenges and opportunities in the industry.
Due to the increasing need for accountability, many marketing organizations use a variety of metrics to track strategic performance, allowing for corrective action to be taken as required.
Instead, strategic analysts are seeking insights into the firm's operating environment to identify possible future scenarios, opportunities, and threats.
[citation needed] Mintzberg suggests that the top planners spend most of their time engaged in analysis and are concerned with industry or competitive analyses as well as internal studies, including the use of computer models to analyze trends in the organization.
[15] Strategic planners use a variety of research tools and analytical techniques, depending on the environment complexity and the firm's goals.
The choice of tool depends on a variety of factors including: data availability; the nature of the marketing problem; the objective or purpose, the analyst's skill level as well as other constraints such as time or motivation.
For this reason, some companies engage external consultants, often advertising or marketing agencies, to provide an independent assessment of the firm's capabilities and resources.
Applying this definition to marketing strategy, companies must be wary that they do not purposefully seek to seclude groups of people based on their cultural background.
A company that is seeking to expand internationally has a duty to establish their marketing agenda with multiple cultures in mind, so as to prevent bodies of people from getting left out.
[49] In 1980, Michael Porter developed an approach to strategy formulation that proved to be extremely popular with both scholars and practitioners.
[51] Porter's approach was the dominant paradigm throughout the 1980s, allowing others who sought to formulate strategy within their business model to follow his (at the time) best division of the ways in which to target the market.
The resource-based view suggests that organizations must develop unique, firm-specific core competencies that will allow them to outperform competitors by doing things differently and in a superior manner.
[54] Barney stated that for resources to hold potential as sources of sustainable competitive advantage, they should be valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable.
[55] A key insight arising from the resource-based view is that not all resources are of equal importance nor possess the potential to become a source of sustainable competitive advantage.
[10] Barney and others point out that understanding the causal relationship between the sources of advantage and successful strategies can be very difficult in practice.
[55] Barney calls the situation where there is a connection to a firm's organized materials and when their continued competitive advantage is only partially comprehended as "casually ambiguous".
[59] Such a logic of analysis was implicit in the original formulation of RA theory and although it was taken into consideration by several scholars,[60][61] it has never been articulated explicitly and tested empirically.
In the resource-based view, strategists select the strategy or competitive position that best exploits the internal resources and capabilities relative to external opportunities.
Given that strategic resources represent a complex network of inter-related assets and capabilities, organizations can adopt many possible competitive positions.
Although scholars debate the precise categories of competitive positions that are used, there is general agreement, within the literature, that the resource-based view is much more flexible than Porter's prescriptive approach to strategy formulation.
[65] A horizontal integration strategy may be indicated in fast-changing work environments as well as providing a broad knowledge base for the business and employees.
[74][75] Most firms carry out strategic planning every 3– 5 years and treat the process as a means of checking whether the company is on track to achieve its vision and mission.
Strategies are broad in their scope in order to enable a firm to react to unforeseen developments while trying to keep focused on a specific pathway.
[79] They emphasize these product developments, and in a significant number of cases, studies have shown that early entrants – or pioneers – into a market have serious market-share advantages above all those who enter later.
It has been found that while Pioneers in both consumer goods and industrial markets have gained “significant sales advantages”,[82] they incur larger disadvantages cost-wise.
[86] On the other hand, if the needs and wants of consumers have only slightly altered, Late Followers could have a cost advantage over early entrants due to the use of product imitation.
[87] If the marketing mix is not used correctly – despite the entrant time – the business will gain little to no advantages, potentially missing out on a significant opportunity.
Currently more research has to be done to discern a way that prevents this strategy, because a generalized set of rules to police what is considered the overall "good" cannot be instituted.
Developing competitive strategy requires significant judgement and is based on a deep understanding of the firm's current situation, its past history and its operating environment.
