548 The Marketing Book
required in their organizations, if their market-
ing strategies are to be successfully imple-
mented. In many ways, it is understanding this
issue that is the key to the paradox that while
marketing implementation problems may often
come down to very simple and obvious factors,
actually solving such implementation problems
may be extremely difficult. These hidden
dimensions of the marketing implementation
problem may reduce to such issues as:
The separation of planning from management,
leading to an absence of management
involvement and commitment.
Unrealistic optimism about markets,
competition and a company’s capabilities
because planners are separated from the
problems of actually running the business.
The implementation issue is recognized too
late in the process, so managers are left trying
to gain implementation through coercion, and
ignore the underlying costs of organizational
change (see below).
The existence of implementation problems is
simply denied by management, who cannot
believe that their decisions will not be put into
effect.
Do we have an implementation
problem in marketing?
Perhaps the most basic reason the marketing
implementation issue is ignored when market-
ing plans and strategies are formulated is that
executives do not believe that they have a
marketing problem or that they need to change
anything to get their strategies implemented.
One observation (Piercy, 2002) is that com-
panies, and in fact different units within the
same organization, differ significantly in two
important respects:
1 The perception that there is a marketing
problem in the organization, which should be
taken seriously.
2 The willingness to try something new to solve
the problem.
A first step in working with a company to get to
grips with the marketing implementation issue
may be to ask which of the following best
describes the situation we face in implementing
our marketing strategy? Closed minds– people do not believe there is
any significant marketing problem, and
therefore see no reason to change the way
they do things.
Worried stayers and frightened rabbits– where
people know that they have major marketing
problems, but are either unwilling to change
the way things are done in their company or
simply do not know how to change.
Blissful ignorance– situations where people
believe they are always open to new ideas and
change, but they do not really need to do
anything differently, because they do not really
believe that they have any problems.
Ready to go– the only situation where we can
reasonably expect new marketing solutions to
be implemented is where people are willing to
change and adopt new ways of doing things,
and they accept that there are important
marketing problems to be solved.The chances are that it is only with the ‘Ready
to go’ case that we can expect implementation
of new marketing strategies to happen, and it
is also likely that in many cases this is not the
situation we will find. The conclusion is that
we may need to think of different imple-
mentation strategies depending on the type of
barrier we face: pressure to maintain the sta-
tus quo, lack of perception or understanding
of marketing problems to be solved, or both of
these.
It is often suggested that while resistance
to change is a well-known organizational phe-
nomenon (e.g. Darling and Taylor, 1989), it is
surprising that we should suggest that execu-
tives do not see or recognize that there are
marketing problems. Bonoma and Clark (1990)
offer some insight into this issue with their
‘marketing performance assessment’ frame-
work. Their underlying arguments are that: