Differentiate or die or be \u27stuck in the middle\u27 and survive!

Abstract

&ldquo;The reality is that traditional (marketing) implementation approaches have failed&hellip;&rdquo; (Dobni et al., 2001, p. 402) Nevertheless recent research still seeks to identify relationships between Porter&rsquo;s marketing strategies, implementation and performance (Kumar et al. 1997; Teach and Schwartz, 2000). Although each study included the Porter&rsquo;s strategy types none actually classified business units into ideal differentiators, ideal cost leaders and combination differentiation cost leaders to conduct &ldquo;implementation-performance process&rdquo; comparisons.This study has made a contribution to the study of marketing implementation and marketing performance by separating and comparing strategies such as ideal differentiation, ideal cost leadership, and combination (differentiation/cost leadership) strategies with the &ldquo;stuck in the middle&rdquo; marketing strategy type.A key implementation finding was the importance of paying high salaries to attract the best employees when implementing either a differentiation strategy or a combined (differentiation/ cost leadership) strategy. However for the other six implementation tools, the findings support Kelliher and Perrett (2001, p.421) whose findings &ldquo;do not indicate a clear relationship between business strategy and the approach to HRM.&rdquo;A key performance finding was that differentiation is the best strategy in terms of marketing performance while cost leadership is the worst performing strategy. Both differentiation and the combination strategy (differentiation/cost leadership) outperformed cost leadership.<br /