Domain of Marketing Strategy

In 1998, I solicited the input of the members of the American Marketing Association (AMA) Marketing Strategy Special Interest Group (SIG) to the following question: “What do you view as the general domain of marketing strategy and major substantive areas within its domain?”

Summarized below are the responses (edited) from 35 marketing academicians.

The domain of marketing strategy is:

· The study of a business’ decisions and actions that impact on its relationship with customers, competitors and channel members.

· The study of a business’ assets, competencies, processes, and routines involved in its interactions with customers and marketing intermediaries.

· The study of value-creation processes for the entities involved in a transaction.

· The study of organizational and inter-organizational issues that impact on a business’ ability to design and deliver products that are valued by customers, and provide a competitive advantage and an acceptable return to the firm.

· The study of strategies that businesses use to create value for customers.

· The discipline of creating and sustaining offerings of superior value to customers in a competitive marketplace.

· The leveraging of the distinctive competencies of and resources made available to the marketing function to achieve sustainable competitive positional advantages.

· The pursuit of customer advantage by anticipating and meeting customers’ needs.

The following constitutes an attempt on my part toward synthesis of the above responses:

“The domain of marketing strategy is the study of organizational and inter-organizational phenomena including processes, routines, decisions and actions concerned with a business’ development of products that offer value to customers, interactions with customers, competitors and collaborators, leveraging of asset stocks that reside in the marketing function, and deployment of firm resources entrusted to the marketing function designed to achieve specific organizational objectives.”

I have given considerable thought to and written about the conceptual distinctions between corporate strategy, competitive strategy at the business unit level (other equivalent terms used include competitive strategy, business strategy, business unit strategy, market strategy). By developing and disseminating a draft statement on the domain of marketing strategy, eliciting input from the community of academics, practitioners and consultants interested in makreting strategy related issues, I intend to refine the above conceptulaization of the domain of marketing strategy.

I look forward to your comments on the merits of developing a domain statement and the proposed draft domain statement. Propose alternative domain statements and/or revisions of the proposed statement.