The basics of marketing strategy 81
that various new ‘realized niches’ could emerge.
Even here, however, the implicit emphasis is on
the individual firms as the motivating force
rather than the collective of customers in the var-
ious markets.
Third, advances in agent-based modelling
promise new ways of simulating more complex
interactive processes of spatial competition (Tes-
fatsion, 2001; Ishibuchi et al., 2001). Agent-based
modelling essentially depends on allowing a
simulation to evolve with individual ‘agents’
making choices within an undeterming but
defined rule structure. It may well provide us
with a better understanding of the patterns of
market-based evolution and the nature of some
of the key contingencies.
Conclusions: the limits of relevance and the problems of application
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 rea-
sonably confident from a theoretical perspective
that such knowledge is not systematically avail-
able because of the nature of the competitive
process itself. In this way, the academic study of
marketing strategy remains open to the chal-
lenge that it is not relevant to marketing prac-
tice. Yet to represent the problem solely in this
way is to privilege one particular notion of the
nature and use of academic research in market-
ing 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 sus-
tained 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 lim-
its to our knowledge in marketing strategy may
also help in a constructive way to define what
can and cannot be achieved by more investiga-
tion and research.
There are a number of areas in which we can
both improve our level of knowledge and pro-
vide some guidance and assistance in the devel-
opment 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 mar-
keting 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 ques-
tions are most usefully framed not around ques-
tions of imitation and sustainability that assume
sustainability is a serious option, but rather
around the more general patterns of market evo-
lution: 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).
When it comes to the generics of success, we
face an even greater problem. By definition, any
approach which really depends on analysis of
means or averages leaves us with a further
dilemma: not only does any relative ‘usable’
explanation only provide us with a very partial
picture where there are many unexplained out-
comes, but also the very notion of a publicly
available ‘rule for success’ in a competitive mar-
ket is itself contradictory, except in the context of
a possible temporary advantage. Indeed, it
would appear that in very rapid response mar-
kets such as currency markets this temporal