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 MBAs with a Mission by Brook Raflo Thinking inside the Box by Nicholas Shreiber, Guest Columnist - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  Online Feedback Form Tell us what you think about Goizueta Magazine |
Anil Menon and Sundar Bharadwaj, both associate professors of marketing, received this year's Marketing Science Institute/H. Paul Root Award for their article in the prestigious Journal of Marketing on the key ingredients for making a successful marketing strategy. Their article was a revival of sorts. A hot topic two decades ago-when the corporate world believed in the wisdom and efficiency of centralized planning-the plug was pulled on marketing strategy when the whole idea of top-down management came under fire in the 1980s. "The military model of really smart geeks at headquarters and implementers lower down just didn't work in organizations. It was too slow and ineffective," Bharadwaj explains. The corporate world started to experiment with handing off the strategy-making responsibility to smaller units or divisions of large companies, many of which were deliberately located well away from headquarters. Aside from this trend toward decentralization of strategy making, "the distinction between planning and implementation or execution phases became increasingly blurred in most dynamic markets," Menon says. As Bharadwaj and Menon watched these shifts, they became uneasy. Their own conversations with marketing managers suggested that neither the old nor the new models accurately reflected reality. What they were hearing was that most successful marketing strategies were born in mixed groups of planners and implementers blending their own ideas and experiences. "People can easily see that one firm has a better marketing strategy than another, but how they go about creating those strategies isn't as visible to the outside world," says Bharadwaj. "Certainly some marketing strategies or innovations are 'eureka' moments, but even then you have to first create the conditions for those sorts of things to happen." "This hidden process of creating and executing superior strategies is what my colleague Sundar calls a strategic asset of a firm, or as it is popularly called, a core capability. The important point is that it is a capability that is embedded in a company and hence a barrier to competition since it is not easily imitable," Menon says. After all, the two reasoned, if superior marketing is a competitive advantage in the marketplace, wouldn't the process that produces superior strategies be equally important? Wouldn't marketing planners and managers be interested in knowing how they could go about improving their competitive edge? Attempting to model the process and label the characteristics of successful marketing strategy design was something that had not been systematically attempted before. It was possible for Menon and Bharadwaj only because they enjoyed strong support from both Goizueta and the Strategic Planning Institute, an international think tank based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that focuses on business strategy. To come up with an initial model, they conducted focus groups of senior managers from multiple industries and drew from what literature did exist on the subject of strategy making. When the initial model was complete, they went back to the marketing managers and asked for feedback, then revised their model again. "We kept asking, 'Does this make sense?'" Bharadwaj remembers. The model then was included in a mail survey of more than fifteen hundred senior-level marketing managers at Fortune 1,000 companies. |
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