Advanced Introduction to Marketing Strategy

Abstract

The above quote from Peter Drucker reminds us of the central role of the customer in any marketing strategy, and the need to understand not just the customer’s changing needs, but also changes in the environmental context, to offer superior customer value and achieve competitive advantage. Traditional methods of developing marketing strategies may be less suitable in highly turbulent industries or in embryonic markets where customers’ needs are difficult to pin down. The recent pandemic has only heightened uncertainty and turbulence faced by marketing decision makers. In recent years we have seen an emergence of an outside-in approach for marketing strategy development, which increases a firm’s ability to anticipate and react to customer changes due to constant environmental scanning and sensing (Day 2014). This volume, by Prof. George S. Day of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, is a visionary rethinking of marketing strategy for today’s turbulent environment, stressing the need for managers to consider the outside-in approach for value creation and marketing strategy formulation. In Chapter 1, Prof. Day develops a definition of marketing strategy, and outlines the benefits of taking a marketing strategic approach, centered on customer orientation and sustaining superior customer value. This definition is then transformed into four guiding premises, or marketing strategy building blocks, which become the outline for the rest of the book. These are: