Denial at the top table: status attributions and implications for marketing

Senior marketing management is seldom represented on the Board of Directors nowadays, reflecting a deteriorating status of the marketing profession. We examine some of the key reasons for marketing’s demise, and discuss how the status of marketing may be restored by demonstrating the value of marketing to the business community. We attribute marketing’s demise to several related key factors: narrow typecasting, marginalisation and limited involvement in product development, questionable marketing curricula, insensitivity toward environmental change, questionable professional standards and roles, and marketing’s apparent lack of accountability to CEOs. Each of these leads to failure to communicate, create, or deliver value within marketing. We argue that a continued inability to deal with marketing’s crisis of representation will further erode the status of the discipline both academically and professionally

Competitive Positioning and the Resource Based View of the Firm

Two apparently contradictory paradigms have come to dominate the strategic management literature over the last decade. The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm seeks to explain sustainable competitive advantage through the rent earning capability of internal scarce resources while the marketing paradigm stresses the need for external market orientation to achieve competitive success. This paper reconciles the two through the concepts of competitive positioning. It develops a hierarchy of marketing resources, assets and capabilities and discusses how these can be deployed to achieve alternative competitive positions. A research agenda is proposed

Strategic Planning Differences among Multiple Stakeholder Orientation Profiles

Despite being a significant topic in the literature, research into stakeholder interests is at an early stage. Although a company has an orientation to each stakeholder group these orientations exist simultaneously, giving a multiple stakeholder orientation profile (MSOP). We theorize that firms with different MSOPs will approach their strategic planning in different ways. We tested our predictions in UK companies, and found that indeed there are many strategic planning differences among different MSOPs. The most striking differences are in learning and innovative management, but there are also differences in objectives, competitive positioning and sustainable competitive advantage. Implications for theory and practice are presented