Marketing strategy and the internet: An organizing framework

Competitive strategy is primarily concerned with how a business should deploy resources at its disposal to achieve and maintain defensible competitive positional advantages in the marketplace. Competitive marketing strategy focuses on how a business should deploy marketing resources at its disposal to facilitate the achievement and maintenance of competitive positional advantages in the marketplace. In a growing number of product-markets, the competitive landscape has evolved from a predominantly physical marketplace to one encompassing both the physical and the electronic marketplace. This article presents a conceptual framework delineating the drivers and outcomes of marketing strategy in the context of competing in this broader, evolving marketplace. The proposed framework provides insights into changes in the nature and scope of marketing strategy; specific industry, product, buyer, and buying environment characteristics; and the unique skills and resources of the firm that assume added relevance in the context of competing in the evolving marketplace. P. Rajan Varadarajan is a distinguished professor of marketing and the Ford chair in marketing and e-commerce in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of strategy and e-commerce. His research on corporate, business, and marketing strategyrelated issues has been published in theJournal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, and other leading journals. He is coauthor of a textbook titledContemporary Perspectives on Strategic Market Planning. Dr. Varadarajan served as editor of theJournal of Marketing from 1993 to 1996. He currently serves on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Marketing Science and as editor of theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science. Manjit S. Yadav is an associate professor of marketing and Mays Faculty Fellow, Department of Marketing, Mays Business School, Texas A&M University. He obtained his Ph.D. in marketing from Virginia Tech. His research focuses on electronic commerce, firms’ pricing strategies, and consumers’ price perceptions. He has published in a number of journals, includingJournal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, andSloan Management Review. He is a member of the Editorial Review Board of theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science. At Texas A&M, Dr. Yadav developed and currently teaches a graduate course (Strategic Foundations of E-Commerce) dealing with the strategic challenges and opportunities in the emerging electronic marketplace. He served as cochair of the American Marketing Association’s 2001 Faculty Consortium on Electronic Commerce held at Texas A&M University.