The study and application of marketing strategy therefore reflects a basic dilemma. The key
demand in terms of application is to address the causes of an individual firm or unit success
in the competitive marketplace, yet we can be reasonably confident from a theoretical
perspective that such knowledge is not systematically available because of the nature of the
competitive process itself. In this way, the academic study of marketing strategy remains
open to the challenge that it is not relevant to marketing practice.
Yet to represent the problem solely in this way is to privilege one particular notion of the
nature and use of academic research in marketing as well as the relationship between
research and practice. The issue of the relationship between theory and practice and the
notion of relevance as the intermediary construct between the two is of course itself both
problematic in general (Wensley, 1997c; Brownlie, 1998), as well as open to a range of
further critical questions, particularly with respect to the institutional structures that have
been developed and sustained on the assumption of the divide itself (Wensley, 2002b), and
therefore at some level represent interest in maintaining the divide but in the name of
bridging it! Recognizing the limits to our knowledge in marketing strategy may also help in a
constructive way to define what
can and cannot be achieved by more investigation and research.
There are a number of areas in which we can both improve our level of knowledge and
provide some guidance and assistance in the development of strategy. First, we can identify
some of the generic patterns in the process of market evolution which give some guidance
as to how we might think about and frame appropriate questions to be asked in the
development of marketing strategy. Such questions would be added to those we are used to
using in any marketing management context, such as the nature of the (economic) value
added to the customer based on market research evidence and analysis.
It has been suggested in strategy by writers such as Dickinson (1992) that such additional
questions are most usefully framed not around questions of imitation and sustainability that
assume sustainability is a serious option, but rather around the more general patterns of
market evolution: standardization, maturity of technology, and the stability of current
networks. Of course, such a view about sustainability is also very much in tune with both
Schumpeterian views about the nature of economic innovation and the general Austrian
view about the nature of the economic system (Wensley, 1982; Jacobson, 1992).
Finally, we may need to recognize that the comfortable distinction between marketing
management, which has often been framed in terms of the more tactical side of marketing,
and marketing strategy is not really sustainable.
At one level all marketing actions are strategic: we have little knowledge as to how even
specific brand choices at the detailed level impact or not on the broad development of a
particular market, so we are hardly in a position to label some choices as strategic in this
sense and others as not. On the other hand, the knowledge that we already have and are
likely to develop in the context of the longerterm evolutionary patterns for competitive
markets will not enable us to engage directly with marketing managerial actions and choices
at the level of the firm: the units of both analysis and description are likely to be different. In
our search for a middle way which can inform individual practice, it may well be that some
of the thinking tools and analogies that we have already developed will prove useful, but
very much as means to an end rather than solutions in their own right.
