The role of retentions in how marketing managers change their strategic orientation

This study looks at how a marketing organization changed its strategic orientation in response to environmental factors, and at the influence of retentions on the change effort. Retentions are defined , here as the concepts and mental models used by marketing managers when trying to respond to environmental changes. The influence of retentions on strategic orientation and factors affecting how retentions change are studied in the context of how a bank trust department responded to the deregulation of the financial services industry between 1982 and 1984. The dominant retentions held by managers both before and after deregulation are presented, and the events that contributed to the change of the retentions are examined. The results suggest that retentions prior to deregulation focused on external sources of influence and were associated with a defender strategic orientation. Retentions after deregulation, once the organization's strategic orientation stabilized, focused on critical resources and competitors and were associated with an analyser orientation. The adoption of the new retentions lagged deregulation by several years, and the transition did not match the steps prescribed by the marketing and strategic management literature. Instead, the transition took place through an iterative sequence of behaviours and evaluations more characteristic of the organizing model (Weick 1979). Managers changed their retentions incrementally by enacting small changes, evaluating the outcomes of their behaviour, and letting the outcomes redefine their retentions.