پیشبرد استراتژی بازاریابی : از وعده، غفلت، برتری، تقسیم (وعده؟)
Abstract
The promise of marketing strategy in Era I
Butler et al.’s (1918) Marketing Methods
The neglect of marketing strategy in Era II
White (1927) and Alderson (1937)
The prominence of marketing strategy in Era III
GE’s ‘marketing concept’
Levitt’s (1960) ‘Marketing myopia’ and Borden’s ‘marketing mix’
Alderson’s ‘competition for differential advantage’
Howard’s (1957) Marketing Management
McCarthy’s (1960) Basic Marketing
Conceptualizing marketing strategy in Era III
Marketing strategy becomes a ‘fragment’ in Era IV
Market orientation strategy
Relationship marketing strategy
Brand equity strategy
Varadarajan’s conceptualisation of strategic marketing
R-A theory of competition
The essence of the ‘R-A theory grounds strategy’ argument
Strategy at the end of Era IV
Marketing’s Era V, promising or problematic?
The prospects for Era V are promising
The prospects for Era V are problematic
Explaining Era IV’s slide towards academic irrelevance
Conclusion and prognosis for Era V
A tentative prognosis
References
The marketing discipline is troubled, as prominent commentaries show. For example, Piercy (2002, p. 354) claims that ‘by failing to make the impact of other disciplines . . . our discipline stands a good chance of falling by the wayside . . . we have allowed intellectual leadership in important areas to pass to others.’ As a second example, Sheth and Sisodia (2006, p. 325) maintain that the discipline needs to be ‘reformed’ because it has become ‘hyperanalytical and heroically rigorous about trivialities’. Third, Lehmann, McAlister, and Staelin (2011, p. 155; italics added) point out that marketing’s major journals show ‘a noticeably increased emphasis on the use of . . . complex analyses and an accompanying decrease in emphasis on the importance of the topics explored.’ Consequently, ‘our field is becoming increasingly marginalised’. Fourth, Clark, et al.’s (2014, p. 233) bibliographic analysis of the ‘export’ vs. ‘import’ of citations among the leading business journals of the four major business disciplines (i.e. accounting, finance, management and marketing) finds that marketing ‘is situated below . . . all other business disciplines in the flow of ideas.’ Furthermore, when they focus on just the citation flows between marketing and management, they find that ‘the gap between exports and imports for the two fields has widened over time’ (p. 231). In short, the marketing discipline is the least influential of the four major business disciplines in terms of interdisciplinary citation flows, and the situation is getting worse. The discipline is, indeed, troubled. Similarly, the area of strategic marketing within the marketing discipline is troubled. In the early 1990s, Day (1992, p. 324) cautioned that ‘within academic circles the contribution of marketing to the development, testing, and dissemination of strategy theories and concepts’ was being ‘marginalised’. Almost two decades later, Reibstein, Day, and Wind (2009, p. 1) decried the fact that ‘the growing balkanization of academic marketing into quantitative modeling and consumer behavior has diminished research on strategic marketing issues.’ Recently, Varadarajan (2010) maintains that strategic marketing’s lack of clarity and consensus as to its theoretical foundations, its nature and its scope has resulted in the field suffering from an ‘identity crisis’. Similarly, Shaw’s (2012, p. 32, 33) historical review (1) characterises the strategic marketing area as a ‘semantic jungle of strategy terms’, (2) notes that a ‘fundamental problem is the lack of an integrating theoretical framework’ and (3) concludes that ‘the present state of marketing strategy knowledge is inconsistent at best and incoherent at worst’. Finally, Houston (2016) warns that (1) so few doctoral students self-identify as ‘strategy’ researchers and (2) so few ‘traditional marketing strategy research’ articles are published in major journals that ‘strategy’ may be becoming a ‘taboo’ topic or ‘dirty word’. Strategic marketing is, indeed, troubled.