The Marketing Book 5th Edition

Is it really a

coherent and

complete strategy?

Is the strategy

capable of being

implemented by this

company at this time?

Have we communicated

the strategy, adapted

it, won support for it?

The strategy does

not tell us what

to do

Lip-service – we may

agree with the strategy

but we cannot implement

The strategy is not

accepted – counter-

implementation emerges

No implementation

No implementation

No implementation

Implementation

Test the strategy Results Reasons

550 The Marketing Book

and strategies with key players inside the

organization, then it is likely that

non-acceptance and counter-implementation

will follow, rather than the ‘ownership’ and

commitment that is needed to gain

implementation.

However, while the first stage in our
thinking about implementation problems
should be to ask such questions about the
strategy itself, the fact remains that there may
also be problems that genuinely do reflect a
company’s capabilities and resistance to unwel-
come change.
If our analysis of strategic gaps (Figure
21.4), internal perceptions of marketing prob-
lems and willingness to change, sources of
marketing implementation barriers, and the

robustness of our marketing strategy (Figure

21.6) leads us to the conclusion that there are

significant marketing implementation problems,

then we may need a framework for planning and

building a marketing implementation strategy.

Although it is far from the perfect answer, one

approach to this is to use internal marketing as

the structure for our implementation strategy,

and the direct counterpart to our conventional

external marketing strategy.

Marketing implementation and internal marketing strategy

If we reach the stage where we wish to build

an explicit implementation strategy for our

Figure 21.6 Testing marketing strategies
Source: Adapted from Piercy (2002).