RESEARCH METHADOLOGY

SUMMARY OF 10 ARTICLES
PRESENTED TO : DR. TAHIR MASOOD QURESHI BY: MUHAIB AAMIR (L1F10MBBF2030)

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MARKETING & THE EXAMINATION OF BUSINESS STRATEGIES

A Framework for Examining the Implementation of Business Strategies Authors defined three different levels of analysis. 1. Corporate-business unit relationships These variables are related to the business unit's role within the overall organization and to the re- sources and flexibility it has in pursuing its individual strategy. These variables include, for example, the corporate structure, the allocation of resources across business units, the amount of decentralization and the autonomy of the business unit's managers, the amounts and types of synergy across businesses, and the criteria and systems the corporation uses to evaluate, control, and reward the business unit's performance. 2. Inter-functional structure and processes These variables are related to the division and coordination of activities among functional departments and work groups within the business unit. These variables include the allocation of financial and personnel resources across departments, competencies in relation to competitors, relative influence on decisions made within the business unit, coordination structures and conflict resolution mechanisms, and the sys- tems used to control and reward the performance of the various departments. 3. Marketing policies and processes. Though there should be consistency between all functional departments' policies and programs and the business unit's strategic objectives, we primarily examine marketing's role in strategy implementation. Therefore this category consists of variables related to the structure, budgets, and competitive strengths and weak- nesses of marketing activities within the business unit. In the following sections we review conceptual arguments about the influence of the three categories of organizational variables on the likely performance of businesses. Personal characteristics related to the back- ground, experience, training, values, and perceptions of a business unit's personnel have been hypothesized to mediate the unit's ability to implement different strategies successfully.

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Marketing and the Implementation of Business Strategies

For the Implementing of any business strategy requires a concrete coordination of a variety of tasks and activities across many functional departments and work units. Different functional activities have base roles in the successful implementation of different kinds of strategies. The article suggests that:

The resources of marketing must be competent enough when compared with their department functionalities The resources hired for marketing strategy must be effective and efficient as compared to its competitors
Marketing department must have participation in decision and policy making

There must be effective mechanism for the coordination between departments There must be mechanism for solving the conflict between the resources or departments

Distinctive Competence: Distinctive competence refers that what a business do unique particularly when compared to its competitors working in similar environment. The greater the competence in marketing i.e. personal selling , product R&D and engineering relative to competitors the greater the performance of prospector business. Some marketing resources have primary objective of getting edge through price. Therefore they have a great control on services of products. The greater the edge in production & distribution control the greater the performance of low cost. The greater the control on those functions on which the company maintains a unique advantage over competitors, the greater will be the performance.

The marketing department must have a deep coordination with every department of the company to obtain an edge over the competitors. Otherwise the competitors will not give a chance to the company to survive in the market.

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Marketing Service Relationships: The Role of Commitment

Central role of commitment:
In marketing the commitment plays a major role. In marketing relationship the desired sales are only possible when there is continuity in relationship between business and client. Quality and satisfaction helps to enhance the relationship, In addition the trust and dependence plays an important role in it.

Close relationship with customers:

In marketing close relationships helps to retain the client on long term basis. Marketing is all about providing the client what he wants. As the time passes on the customer needs services and the desire to take services increases, here the long term and close relationships helps to attract the client. The close relationship creates a barrier on client for switching & helps to retain for a lifetime.

Commitment Is an Affective State Of Mind

A commitment is a state of mind which one person has towards a relationship with another person. This kind of commitment is called affective commitment. Affective commitment is depends on a sense of liking and emotional attachment to a particular person.

Effective Commitment Results:

Commitment is the most effective for developing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships between partners. Affective commitment has strong positive influences on: intention to stay in a relationship; desire to stay in a relationship; performance; and Willingness to invest in a relationship

Crucial importance of service quality:

Quality of service pervaded to the client has crucial importance because once a negative services provided to the client then it will ruin the relationship with the client even in strong commitments.

Reality is the key to success:

All the realities must be disclosed to the clients, reality is always the key to success. If the client doest find any reality in services provided then it gives negative impact on client.

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Strategic Planning & Marketing

Difference between Marketing and Strategic Marketing: Marketing plays an important role in different parts of the organization. Marketing represents the boundary between the company and the market. Strategic marketing is also not possible without the interference of marketing management. Strategic marketing is done to support the organization goals and strategies .In Strategic marketing all the marketing activities are aligned in the way to support the objective of the company .

ROLE OF MARKETING STRATEGIES IN THE ORGANIZATION

Organizational Level Corporate Role of Marketing Provide customer and competitive prospective for corporate strategic planning Assist in the development of strategic perspective of the business Formulate marketing programs Formal Name Corporate marketing

Business Unit

Strategic marketing

Market

Marketing management

THREE CS OF MARKETING STRATEGY:

CUSTOMER CORPORATION COMPETITION These three Cs are the dynamic and living creatures with their own objectives to pursue. For the formulation of effective and efficient strategies of marketing , these three Cs must be kept in mind.

Three decisions:
Where to compete How to compete When to compete For the formulation of marketing strategy with the interplay of three Cs these three decisions must be made efficiently.
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THE CHANGING ROLE OF MARKETING

As the time passes on changes are take place in every part of life, every aspect changes and improvements are made in it. Marketing and its role is also changing with passage of time.

Marketing as a Social Process:

The managerial approach brought relevance and realism to the study of marketing, with an emphasis on problem solving, planning, implementation, and control in a competitive marketplace. Marketing is done by increasing the social circle; marketing is all about having commitments and relations.

Marketing management:
Marketing management became a extensively accepted business function, breaking boundaries of a more traditional sales management approach, with an emphasis on product planning and development, pricing, promotion, and distribution. Marketing research gained prominence in management practice for aligning the firm's productive capabilities with the needs of the clients in the market.

Marketing as an Optimization Problem:

Marketing focused on demand, costs, and profitability and the use of traditional economic analysis for maximization of the breakeven point. Marketing now focuses on needs of people and provide them what they want.

The Organizational Response:

The employees of the organization resist the change. The changing role of marketing makes the implementation of marketing strategies more difficult for the management. Organizational response is always negative; they did not easily accept the changes. The successful implementation of strategies with the changes is only effective when the organizational response is positive otherwise it will be the waste of time.

Positioning the Product, and Deciding When and How:

The positioning of the product in right market place and making decisions of when and how to launch the product is very crucial for the management to decide. The changing role of marketing is changing the way of managements workings.

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Marketing Actions with a Social Dimension Legitimation :

Legitimating represents an awareness of how well the organization holds environmental norms. In particular, there are two elements of legitimating that are of interest in this study. The first is called "pragmatic legitimacy" An organization will achieve pragmatic legitimacy on the basis of those constituents that make self-interested calculations of the need-satisfying ability of an organization. Pragmatic legitimacy is consistent with a person who is driven primarily by an egoistic motivation, in which his or her ultimate goal is to in- crease his or her own welfare. Organizations therefore must aspire to a second aspect of legitimacy for long-run survival: social legitimacy. Social legitimacy "reflects a positive normative evaluation of the organization and its activities based on a social logic that differs fundamentally from narrow self interest. With social legitimacy, the evaluation of an organization is based on whether the organization's actions are consistent with the welfare of the community and society. This is consistent with a person who is driven primarily by an unselfish motivation in which the ultimate goal is to enhance the welfare of others.

Support for the Organization:

When an organization has achieved legitimacy, it has been able to provide adequate justification to constituents for its existence. These constituents then will be willing to offer their support for that organization. Therefore, organizations seek to achieve legitimacy from those constituents that have the capacity to support the organization actively.

Institutional Actions:
It Aims at the Institutional Environment. Institutional environment contains a community's social and cultural norms. Organizational action that is in accordance with these accepted social norms indicates that the organization's behavior is proper or legitimate.

Per formative Actions: It aims at the Task Environment Because of the nature of the task
environment, organizations must respond with tangible actions to accomplish specific, measurable objectives. Such actions demonstrate the organization's equivalence with the norms of the task environment Actions aimed at the norms of the task environment are referred to here as per formative actions.

Limitations:
The theoretical dispute for institutional actions as the moderating variable posits that, given both negative and positive institutional conditions, per formative action will not have an effect. The results, however, only support the negative institutional action condition as the moderator. Although the manipulation of positive institutional actions passed exact manipulation and confuse checks, it would have been possible to expose even stronger institutional actions.

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The Nature and Scope Of Marketing Marketing:

The American marketing association defines marketing as the performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from the producer to the consumer. There is no clear definition which covers all aspects and universally accepted.

Social marketing:
The design, implementation and control of programs calculated to get acceptability of social ideas and involving consideration of products, pricing, communication, distribution and marketing research.

Kotlers generic definition:

Marketing is specifically concerned with how transactions are created, stimulated, facilitated and valued.

Scope of marketing:
As marketing gains increasing prominence as an orientation that everyone in the organization shares and as a process that all functions participate in deploying, a critical issue that arises is the role of the marketing function. Specifically, what role should the marketing function play, and what value does the marketing function have, if any, in an organization that has a strong market orientation? The marketing function should play a key role in managing several important connections between the customer and critical firm elements, including connecting the customer to: the product, service delivery, and Financial accountability. The authors collect data from managers across six business functions and two time periods with respect to marketing's role, market orientation, the value of the marketing function, and perceived firm performance. The results show that the marketing function contributes to perceptions of firm financial performance, customer relationship performance, and new product performance beyond that explained by a firm's market orientation. Marketing's value, in turn, is found to be a function of the degree to which it develops knowledge and skills in connecting the customer to the product and to financial accountability. For service firms, the value of the marketing function also is related positively to marketing's ability to connect the customer to service delivery.

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The Rediscovery of the Marketing Concept

The marketing concept helped American businesses gain dominant positions in the worlds economy. Yet, the rush to strategic planning forced out the marketing concept at many companies. Now, as American firms lose their positions, the marketing concept is back in trend. The managements of many American companies have rediscovered the marketing concept, a business philosophy first developed more than three decades ago. In the process, they have found it difficult to develop the customer focus that is central to a market-driven enterprise. Among the barriers to developing that market orientation are: An incomplete understanding of the marketing concept itself; The inherent conflict between short-term and long-term sales and profit goals; An overemphasis on short-term, financially-oriented measures of management performance; and Top management's own values and priorities concerning the relative importance of customers and the firm are other constituencies.

The Changed Business Environment:

This customer orientation offered carefully tailored products and an integrated mix of marketing elements products, prices, promotion, and distribution. A short-term, tactical viewpoint was replaced by along-term, strategic orientation. Marketing planning and the broader area of long-range planning began to merge and evolved into the broader concept of corporate strategic planning which customer markets to serve and which products to offer in those markets.

The Development of the Marketing Concept:

One predictable consequence of market niching is that markets are individually smaller than less carefully defined segments would be. The firm could easily become stronger and stronger in smaller and smaller segments. Strategic planning took its toll primarily in the marketing, R&D , and production areas because financial strategy grew in importance and often conquered the others.

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DEVELOPING A CUSTOMER ORIENTED FIRM

Having identified both the need for and the difficulty of developing a market-driven, customerfocused business, we can outline some of the basic requirements for achieving this goal. These include: Customer-oriented values and beliefs supported by top management; Integration of market and customer focus into the strategic-planning process; The development of strong marketing managers and programs; The creation of market-based measures of performance; and The development of customer commitment throughout the organization.

Each of these is vital to the development of a customer-oriented firm, and weakness in any area is sufficient to ruin the whole effort.

Values and beliefs:

Marketing is not something that can be delegated to a small group of managers while the rest of the organization goes about its business. Rather, it is the whole business as seen from the customer's viewpoint. Everyone in the firm works toward that overriding objective of creating satisfied customers. Each individual, and especially those who have direct contact with the customer in any form, is responsible for the level of customer service and satisfaction. The products defined by each interaction the customer has with any company representative. An important role for marketing management is to be sure that information about customer service and satisfaction is gathered and sent to all parts of the organization on a regular basis.

Connections Drive the Value of the Marketing Function:

The relationship between the marketing function's knowledge and skills in the management of these three customer connections and its value within the firm. We compete that, as the marketing function's knowledge and skills increase in these three areas, the value of the function will in- crease as well. The more the marketing function develops knowledge and skills related to managing the customer-product connection, the greater the function's value to the organization. The more the marketing function develops knowledge and skills related to managing the customer-service delivery connection, the greater the function's value to the organization. The more the marketing function develops knowledge and skills related to managing the customer-financial account- ability connection, the greater the function's value to the organization

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RESEARCH METHADOLOGY

Offensive and Defensive Marketing

Offensive and defensive marketing strategies have distinct benefits, depending on the status of your small business and how successful you are in your local market. An offensive strategy provides a means for your new business to hit the market strong and establish a presence, whereas a defensive strategy can help keep you at the top of your local industry. Each type of marketing requires careful planning and resource allocation to reach the largest number of consumers. For an established company with a wide customer base, defensive marketing is a useful strategy. The company doesn't have to actively work to generate customer interest in its products and can simply reinforce its product messages with consumers. A well-built reputation through quality products makes it difficult for a new competitor to enter the market and attack the established company's customer base. The established company simply uses its defensive marketing to reinforce customer confidence in its products and swat the newcomer away. Offensive Marketing Definition An offensive marketing strategy seeks to attack the market by targeting the weaknesses of the competition and emphasizing the company's strengths in comparison. Offensive marketing does not seek to challenge an industry leader's strengths since that would only play to the leader's defensive marketing capabilities. This strategy attacks the industry leader where the company is at its most vulnerable. For example, a company using an offensive marketing strategy may seek to target an established industry leader's shaky product safety record by emphasizing the safety of its own products. Marketing's role has evolved from simply enhancing demand for the factory's current output to being a critical part of the strategic planning process. Using market information, defining market segments, and target marketing are now crucial components of the business plan. Marketing expertise helps a firm make better marketing decisions that can improve the performance and profitability of the firm. Marketing expertise alone, how- ever, is insufficient? Firms require many skills, including production and financial expertise. Although firms want expertise in many areas, acquiring these skills is expensive. Emphasizing marketing expertise may, by definition, deemphasize other skills. To effectively allocate resources, the firms must find the relative and marginal value of marketing expertise. Thus, making strategic decisions requires judgments about the value of marketing expertise. The preceding experimental findings support the conflict that, though market orientation is undeniably important, the marketing function continues to have an important role to play. In this section, we explore the theoretical and substantive issues raised by our findings. Our ideas focus on providing the field of marketing with a stronger basis for building critical connections in firms and developing a sustainable knowledge base that can drive marketing education and practice in the twenty-first century.

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