Strategic Marketing Management Summary:
Strategic Marketing Lecture 1:
What makes firms/brands different:
Marketing strategy= A thoughtful plan by a company to produce desired outcomes in the
marketplace vis-à-vis customers, channel members, and competitors
- An organisation’s integrated pattern of decision that specify its crucial choices
concerning products, markets, marketing activities, and marketing resources in the
creation, communication, and/or delivery of products that offer value to customers
in exchanges with the organisation and thereby enables the organisation to achieve
specific objectives.
Strategic Marketing Decisions: (STRATEGY)
Long-term holistic decisions concerning the future directions for the organisations features:
- Entail major resources commitments spread over long periods
- Impact over longer time periods
- Result in a distinguishable competitive advantage
- Irreversible or difficult to reverse
- Entails trade-offs (e.g., if strategy A → strategy B & C foregone …)
- Made in the context of other strategic decisions (interdependencies)
- Made at a higher level of the organisation
Examples of strategic marketing decisions:
- Launching a new product
- Rationalizing a product line
- Rebranding: changing your brands’ position
- Introduce a loyalty program
- Cater to new market segments
- Developing product leaderships
- Promotional policy changes
- Expanding distribution coverage
- Initiating a major advertising campaign
- Install a social media campaign
- …
VS
,Tactical Marketing Decisions: (EXECUTION)
Short-term (annual or quarterly) decisions to execute the strategic directions within the firm,
filling in the marketing mix of the individual product or brand to realize the company
strategic goals.
- E.g., brand price level, advertising by brand, sales force allocation,
Strategic Marketing Lecture 2: Strategic Decision Making 1
1. Accumulate organisational knowledge:
- Organisational learning
- Enhancing culture and climate
2. Get help:
- Compiling opinions: the wisdom of the crowd
- Obtaining and using data
- Marketing Management Support Systems
3. Be responsive:
- Business cycles
- To competition
- Implementation intentions
4. Think and decide rationally:
- Rational decision making
- Cognitive biases in decision making
1. How to make good strategic decisions:
Organisational learning & Knowledge management
- Nature of organisational knowledge
- The learning process
, - Culture & climate for organisational learning
Nature of organisation learning:
Example: hospital surgery team learning to use a new technology to increase operation
efficiency and effectiveness.
- The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable
advantage
Organisational learning= process of improving organisational actions through better
knowledge and understanding or as the outcome of such a process
Key concepts:
a. Individual learning vs organisational learning
b. Explicit vs tacit knowledge
c. Single-loop learning vs double-loop learning
Individual vs organisational learning:
Organisational knowledge= accumulation of the knowledge bases of all the individuals
within an organisation and the social knowledge embedded in the relationships between
those individuals.
- Organisational learning assumes individual learning, but individual learning is an
insufficient condition for organisational learning – without sharing or transferring
the knowledge, the organisation will not learn.
- More than the sum of parts
- Is also about exchanging and sharing individual assumptions, models, knowledge
across the organisation at various levels:
Individual → Group → Organisation → Inter Organisational
Explicit vs tacit knowledge:
- Firms formalize their explicit or ‘tangible’ knowledge through representations like
manuals, minutes, operating procedures, administrative forms, work routines…
- Tacit knowledge:
, o Low codifiability (= how possible is it for the organisation to structure the
knowledge into a set of identifiable rules and relationships that can easily be
communicated)
o = know-how = how things get done
o Often high complexity
- Transfer of tacit knowledge requires:
o Frequent social interaction, education, training
- Difficult to transfer, but therefore also difficult to imitate!
- Which type of knowledge is more common? More important?
o It depends
o Mostly Tacit is more important because it is harder to imitate by competitors
Single vs double-loop learning:
Single-loop learning (adaptive learning):
- Occurs within a set of recognised and unrecognised constraints that reflect the
organisation’s assumptions about its environment and itself.
- This type of learning solves problems, but ignores the question of why the problem
arose in the first place.
Double-loop learning (generative learning):
- Occurs when the organisation is willing to question long-help assumptions about its
mission, customers, capabilities, or strategy. It uses feedback from past actions to
question assumptions underlying current views.
Organisational learning: the process:
1. Information acquisition:
- From experience, others, formal market research, competitive intelligence, informal
collection of information, experiments, surveys, etc.
- Exploitation= learning from internal experience
- Exploration= learning from external
2. Information dissemination:
- Formal (cross-functional teams, trainings, presentations, etc)
- Informal (social interaction) → Best for uncertain problems/opportunities
3. Information shared interpretation:
- Need agreement on meaning.
- Conflicting resolution & information exchange by organising formal meetings,
discussing alternative options
4. Information utilization:
- Behavioural change
o Action oriented= direct application of knowledge to solve problems
o Knowledge-enhancing= influences managerial perspectives on problems
o Affective use= increases satisfaction with a change
