Marketing implementation: The implications of marketing paradigm weakness for the strategy execution process

Reviewing the marketing strategy implementation issue in an era of a weaker marketing paradigm contrasts traditional sequential flow models of implementation with the “strategy formulation/implementation dichotomy” and leads to the emergence of a processual view of implementation. The processual view clarifies the underlying behavioral and organizational factors that build strategy implementation capabilities. These underlying factors are at risk from a weaker marketing paradigm. The weakening of the marketing paradigm is discussed in terms of the downsizing and disappearance of the marketing function, but more fundamentally in the loss of strategic influence for marketing in the face of competing management paradigms such as the “lean enterprise” and “lean thinking.” The conclusion is that the impact on implementation capabilities is being felt first in companies where the marketing paradigm has been traditionally weak, but that this may be prototypical for other companies in the longer term. A number of important areas for conceptual and empirical attention are indentified. Nigel F. Piercy, Ph.D., is Sir Julian Hodge Chair in Marketing and Strategy with Cardiff Business School, at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, and has held visiting positions at Texas Christian University, the University of California-Berkeley, and the Athens Laboratory for Business Administration. He has published widely in the area of marketing strategy and implementation in the international literature and has had articles published in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of International Marketing, and theJournal of World Business. He has published eight books, most recently the executive textMarket-Led Strategic Change: Transforming the Process of Going to Market (Oxford, UK: Butterworth-Heinemann).