Lecture notes Strategic Marketing
Lecture 1 – Basics of Strategic Marketing
The goal of this lecture is to understand the very basics of strategic marketing (SM) and a
company's strategic marketing orientation (SMO). The lecture will be divided into 3 main
topics:
• Understanding Strategic Marketing
• Building Marketing Strategies
• Selecting Overarching Marketing Strategy
1 Understanding Strategic Marketing – what is is?
• Organizational Behavior in the Marketplace (market dynamics)
• Interactions with its Ecosystem (no firm operates by itself)
à Create value, communicate value (how do I tell customers that this is a value for
them?), deliver value
Trying to create a positive value in the ecosystem for all the stakeholders
Strategic Marketing = more like domain of studies, try to understand the behavior and
interactions of the firms in the ecosystem and how they try to communicate and deliver
value. General management responsibilities associated with the boundary spanning role of
the marketing function in the organization.
Marketing Strategy = the outcome of Strategic Marketing
Understanding Strategic Marketing Issues
• Where to compete?
o Market segments to serve
o Internationalization
• How to compete?
o Marketing mix
o Branding / Positioning
, • When to enter a product-market?
o Order of entry
o Sequential vs Simultaneous entry into international markets. For example,
Netflix entered all countries, or Prime started in the US, following the
emerging markets etc.
• How to enter / exit a product-market?
o Entry: Internal vs. external sourcing of product innovations
o Exit: Spin-off vs. sell-off vs. phase-out
• What is the overarching strategy?
o Market-driven (should we look at all that happens in the marketplace and
react) vs. market-driving (proactive steps, to shape the marketplace, more
radical)
o Primary demand stimulation (increase the size of the market) vs. selective
demand simulation (increase the market-share of the product)
o Superior value vs. lower costs (cost-leadership) vs. dual focus
Understanding Marketing Strategy – Organization’s integrated pattern of decisions that
specify its crucial choices concerning products, markets, marketing activities and marketing
resources in the creation, communication and/or delivery of value to customers in
exchanges with the organization and thereby enables the organization to achieve specific
objectives.
2 Building Marketing Strategies
Marketing Strategy: Strategic decisions in response to Strategic Marketing issues
How do we build Marketing Strategies?
Resource-based View (RBV) of the firm
Resources are the tangible and intangible entities available
to the firm that enable it to produce efficiently and/or
effectively a market offering that has value for some market
segment(s).
The firm can use these resources to service a market
segment efficiently/effectively.
,Tangible assets = Financial (money resources, from banks, loans, investments) or Physical
(fabrics, machines)
Intangible assets = Human, Intellectual (having an understanding of the market dynamics,
knowledge that can help you), Relational (relationship with stakeholders such as
competitors, consumer etc), Competences (processes, capabilities)
RBV: Inside-out Perspective
Marketing resources
1. Marketing Assets – resource endowments the firm has built or acquired over time
2. Marketing Capabilities – The processes that deploy the assets to create a competitive
advantage (Focus: inside-out, internal efficiency, replicability of processes)
3. Dynamic Marketing Capabilities – The processes that create new assets or
capabilities to help sustain the competitive advantage (Focus: inside-out, fitness,
effectiveness) à Market sensing, scanning & sense-making
Strategic Firm Capabilities
• R&D / Tech
• Marketing (see below)
• Operations
Which capability has the strongest impact on firm performance?
, Marketing Capabilities
CRM improves margins
Brand Management improves revenues
Markets are always changing and are increasingly becoming complex
External forces at play – these impact the market and the firms. They completely change
how we are doing things.
PESTEL
Political – Economical – Social – Technical – Environmental – Legal
You need to be mindful of the forces in the environment. You can be more adaptive to the
environment – when you understand the environment:
à Take a step back, see and learn from the environment