Open Marketing: Conceptualizing external parties’ strategic marketing activities

When Day and Wensley (1983) described the strategic orientation of marketing, and hence laid the groundwork for strategic marketing as a key concern, they broadened the marketing concept to include functions both inside and outside of a company. They thereby guided people away from simply targeting customers (consumers) as an operational level problem, a view which had dominated earlier marketing studies. Although marketing in recent years has gained more depth and increasingly included resources and stakeholder concerns, strategic marketing ideas still depart from the individual firm and its circumstances. Recent developments in terms of the collaborative economy and open innovation (Ritter & Schanz, 2019; Öberg & Alexander, 2019; Sanasi et al., 2020) denote how parties both internal and external to a company participate in processes that are not only communicative, but which form a company’s strategy (Whittington et al., 2011).