The marketing and strategic planning interface

This article examines the potential contribution and implementational problems of developing marketing planning as a means to increase the marketing orientation of a company. It draws on the experience gained from a two year involvement in the design and implementation of a planning system for a large manufacturer, and reviews some of the literature on marketing and strategic planning. The focus is on the problems of managing the interface between strategic and marketing management, and the important role played by marketing information, the Chief Marketing Executive and the planning function in achieving effective and integrated strategic marketing planning.     

Marketing planning in the larger family business

In recent decades a considerable literature on marketing planning has accumulated. The larger part relates to marketing planning in big firms with specialized, professional managers. There are books on the subject, like that of Malcolm McDonald which has gone through several editions, and there is also a steady stream of articles in the academic journals. In addition, the marketing planning activities of big firms are referred to by many more writers in the overlapping but broader contexts of “strategic marketing” and “strategic planning”. A lesser part of the literature relates to marketing planning in small firms. The small firms in question are usually very small. Typically they are owner‐managed and employ just a handful of people in a single location. The purpose of this study is to fill a gap in the literature by examining a medium‐sized firm; a category which seems to have been neglected by researchers.

Most modern economies are characterized by a significant group of middle‐sized firms, still owner‐managed, but with multi‐million dollar turnovers. Many of these remain family companies and constitute an important reservoir of business initiative. One such family business is the focus of this study. Given the relative lack of scrutiny of such firms to date, the author decided to conduct an in depth evaluation from within one large, family firm rather than seek by means of questionnaire to obtain information from a significant sample of the group. The results of the study suggest that neither the existing typologies of small firm approaches to marketing nor the formal models of marketing planning attributed to big companies necessarily characterize the marketing planning and management of larger, family businesses.     

Organisational context and behavioural problems as determinants of the effectiveness of the strategic marketing planning process

This paper continues the authors’ recent work on organisational behaviour by arguing that the differences between theory and parctice in marketing planning can be better understood by analysing the corporate environment for marketing management. Thus, variables such as organisational structure, the configuration of corporate decision making processes, patterns of managerial behaviour and the impact of corporate culture, can help us to understand how marketing planning processes operate in practice.

The authors contention is that the real problems associated with the strategic marketing planning process should be grounded in the realities perceived by executives. They go on to discuss a number of common pitfalls in the planning process before reporting on an exploratory empirical study of UK firms with over 100 employees. The implication of the results is seen as reselling the management agenda with regard to the process of marketing planning.     

Personal legitimising: A perspective of marketing management

This paper explains the basic social process of “personal legitimising” and illustrates its influence on marketing activity. Personal legitimising is the process by which individuals manipulate situations to suit their own agenda. The link between personal legitimising and an organisation's marketing activity was discovered using a grounded theory research strategy within a UK management consulting firm.

Personal legitimising has two groupings of behaviour, namely “obstructing existing marketing activity” and “driving new marketing activity”. Within the former are the categories of “stigmatising”, “pseudo endorsing” and “smokescreening”. The latter incorporates the categories of “latching on”, “self indulging” and “bragging”.

The paper has three parts. The first explains the basic social process of personal legitimising. The second shows how grounded theory methodology was used in this context. The third develops the possible contribution of personal legitimising to the understanding of marketing.     

Strategic and organisational determinants of sophistication in deployed sales force automation systems within three industry sectors in the UK

Abstract

This paper investigates strategic and organisational context determinants of the sophistication of adopted sales force automation (SFA) systems in three UK industries: financial services, pharmaceuticals, and building/construction. Sophistication of adopted systems is associated with the organisation placing greater emphasis on information orientation, which is itself driven by an increased integration of IT and sales coupled with increased organisational slack. Increased integration of IT and sales is itself driven by increased strategic importance of sales coupled with increased use of internal communication networks. Importantly, a firm's marketing orientation, although also driven by the strategic importance of sales, has no impact on either information orientation or SFA sophistication. We discuss the implications of our findings to aid understanding of SFA implementation failure.     

Marketing planning and corporate culture: A conceptual framework which examines management attitudes in the context of marketing planning

This paper examines the marketing planning process of a number of British Companies. It finds that the companies who subscribe to what is described in the paper as a “complete marketing planning process”, are further along an organizational evolutionary development path than their semi‐planning and non‐planning counterparts. While the marketing planning process appears on the surface to be just a series of procedural steps, it does in fact embrace a set of underlying values and assumptions. Only the more developed and mature organizations seem likely to have the corporate culture which is capable of sustaining these values. Corporate culture is often intangible to the outsider, but can be very real to those within the company. It develops partly through the way the company has triumphed over adversity in the past, and partly through the so‐called “culture carriers”. These are the influential figures who, by their behaviour, communicate the organizational values they wish to see espoused. Because marketing planning often challenges existing corporate values and attempts to introduce new ones, the process cannot be regarded simply as a neutral, cognitive activity; it is clearly a political process. The problems this poses for executives of organizations and their external advisers are complex and far‐reaching. Nevertheless the potential rewards which result from comprehensive marketing planning can be substantial, and make it a goal worth striving for.     

The importance of integrating marketing planning with corporate planning

“Strategic marketing” implies that marketing has attained a corporate orientation. However, scant evidence is available to support this view. The primary focus of marketing remains at a micro, consumer-oriented level. Integration of marketing planning with corporate planning would suggest a higher perspective for marketers; recognizing that internal integration of planning is as important for effective marketing as external studies of customers and markets. Toward this end, four key dimensions of corporate planning are introduced. As corporate planning constrains marketing planning, it is this most “strategic” of outlooks that needs to be integrated into the process of marketing planning.     

Strategic market environments

The marketing strategy literature stresses the need to find an optimum “fit” between the firm and its environment. Utilising a relatively novel clustering technique, five distinct environments facing marketing managers in the United Kingdom were identified and the marketing strategies adopted in each environment examined. Marketing objectives and strategic focii were found to differ markedly by strategic environments, while competitive advantages created and pursued did not. The latter were found to be company, rather than environment, specific.     

An Entrepreneurial Perspective on the Marketing of Charities

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses marketing activities within charities, with specific reference to the applicability of an entrepreneurial approach, and cause marketing. The efforts of these institutions in recent years to apply the tools of conventional marketing to the services they provide in the markets which they serve is laudable. However, it is argued that in times of environmental turbulence, this is necessary but not sufficient, and that an entrepreneurial perspective on marketing needs to be adopted particularly in relation to cause marketing efforts. Here are elements of risk-taking, proactiveness and innovativeness, and a more recent notion of “network-spotting” or object-orientation. The concept of entrepreneurial intensity in this regard is introduced, as well as a process which can be applied to entrepreneurial marketing in charities. Finally, the obstacles to entrepreneurial marketing by charities are identified.     

Customer Service

Abstract

Maintaining a high level of customer service is one of the best methods of retaining current clients and attracting new ones. Two concepts currently in favor, Total Quality Management and Continuous Quality Improvement, dominate recent thought. This paper builds on these concepts and the basic principles of marketing, to simplify the implementation process. For want of better terms, the author has adopted “LCD” (Lowest Common Denominator) and “Fail-Safe” to describe this approach. LCD encourages simplification so that the newest and least trained employee will be able to work within the system. A Fail-Safe system is designed to be “Customer Friendly” even when an error takes place.     

Integrated Marketing Communications and Market Planning

Abstract

This article links the integrated marketing communications (IMC) concept to the planning process in marketing. Following the current conceptualizations as a combination of various marketing communications tools, IMC strategy is applied to an established strategic market planning model named the Boston Consulting Group (BCG)'s growth-share matrix. Advertising, public relations, sales promotion, and direct marketing are defined as crucial elements for the core scheme. Alternative strategies for brands in different stages are identified from the product portfolio analysis. The view may also be thought of as the ongoing process of building and maintaining brand equity for consumers in the long-term period. Conceptual discussions are expected to help marketers think more strategically as they plan IMC programs for their products or services.     

Social marketing: Conceptual and pragmatic observations from a current Australian campaign

In this paper the authors discuss the meaning of social marketing and its essential differences from “conventional” marketing. Further, by reference to a current campaign which seeks to maximize adoption by medical general practitioners of an “early intervention” package to prevent development of alcohol‐related problems in patients, the authors discuss the merits of the application of social marketing principles to such a public health campaign. The difficulties experienced in both the application of social marketing principles to this campaign and in empirically assessing the effectiveness of this and similar campaigns are also discussed. The authors conclude that, although the validity of social marketing as a theoretical construct is unimpeachable, there is much further work to be done in establishing empirically the effectiveness of the application of the principles of social marketing as a social change strategy.     

Conference report: Second conference on political marketing: Judge institute of management studies,university of Cambridge 27–29 March 1996

Sales promotion activity continues to grow in terms of the number, scale and variety of promotional techniques being used by companies in their marketing communication campaigns. Research among marketing academics has yet to catch up with this reality and sales promotion continues to suffer from relative neglect compared to advertising;from a tendency for all promotional tools to be tarred with a rational economic brush; and from being labelled as a set of “tactical” took that lack the strategic brand‐building possibilities offered by advertising. This article builds upon earlier research examining the communication potential of competitions, to test empirically whether the potential marketing communications benefits claimed for competitions are actually recognised and pursued by marketing practitioners.     

Advertiser Expectations of Agency Creative Product

ABSTRACT

The study reports the development and empirical testing of measures of advertiser expectations of agency produced creative product. This “applied creative,” professional, business-to-business service incorporates extensive process elements. Hence, two measurement models are developed: a traditional “unitary” model, and a dualistic model incorporating elements of process and outcome. The study demonstrates firstly that client expectations of this highly intangible, “applied creative” professional service can be empirically modelled, and secondly, that such measurement does exhibit dimensions of both outcome and process. This paves the way for subsequent modelling of consumer satisfaction or quality evaluation processes within this little explored service category.     

About the authors

It is argued in this paper that marketing theory and practice has reacted largely ineffectively to many of the fundamental challenges posed by developments in other disciplines, illustrated in recent years by total quality management (TQM) and business process re‐engineering (BPR). The urgency of addressing the need for responsiveness to paradigm shifts in other disciplines is underlined by the newest cross‐disciplinary challenge of this kind, which comes from the emergence of “lean thinking” and the conceptualisation of the “lean enterprise”. The goal in this paper is to identify the ways in which lean thinking relates to the marketing process in terms of both conflicts and synergies, and to set an agenda for a productive and timely response from the marketing discipline to the advent of lean thinking.     

Women over 40, foreigners of color,and other missing persons in globalizing mediascapes: understanding marketing images as mirrors of intersectionality

ABSTRACT

Media diversity studies regularly invoke the notion of marketing images as mirrors of racism and sexism. This article develops a higher-order concept of marketing images as “mirrors of intersectionality.” Drawing on a seven-dimensional study of coverperson diversity in a globalizing mediascape, the emergent concept highlights that marketing images reflect not just racism and sexism, but all categorical forms of marginalization, including ableism, ageism, colorism, fatism, and heterosexism, as well as intersectional forms of marginalization, such as sexist ageism and racist multiculturalism. Fueled by the legacies of history, aspirational marketing logics, and an industry-wide distribution of discriminatory work, marketing images help to perpetuate multiple, cumulative, and enduring advantages for privileged groups and disadvantages for marginalized groups. In this sense, marketing images, as mirrors of intersectionality, are complicit agents in the structuration of inequitable societies.     

Competing through relationships: Grounding relationship marketing in resource‐advantage theory

A common element of all views of relationship marketing is the “co‐operate‐to‐compete” thesis. That is, to be an effective competitor often requires one to be an effective co‐operator. One implication of this thesis is that not all instances of firms co‐operating with each other constitute anti‐competitive collusion. This article argues that, although neoclassical, perfect competition theory cannot provide a theoretical foundation for relationship marketing's “co‐operate‐to‐compete” thesis, the recently developed “resource‐advantage” theory of competition can do so. Furthermore, this article uses resource‐advantage theory to address the relationship portfolio conundrum. Specifically, the paper argues that firms should develop a relationship portfolio that is comprised of relationships that constitute relational resources.     

Developing Country Perspectives on Country-of-Origin Effects: The Case of the Proudly South African Campaign

ABSTRACT

Research on the effect of product country of origin (COO) also referred to as “made in campaigns” or “buy national campaigns” has attracted considerable attention from international marketing theorists for the past 40 years. This paper examines how the Proudly South African (PSA) initiative in the context of the global debate on the relevance of the concept of country of origin/buy national campaign/made in campaigns has been developed. Reference is made to other international campaigns such as Made in USA and Buy New Zealand and to the importance of the concept as a cue in the purchase decision-making process of consumers.