CHAPTER 4
The basics of marketing
strategy
ROBIN WENSLEY
Marketing strategy sometimes claims to pro-
vide an answer to one of the most difficult
questions in our understanding of competitive
markets: how to recognize and achieve an
economic advantage which endures. In
attempting to do so, marketing strategy, as with
the field of strategy itself, has had to address
the continual dialectic between analysis and
action, or in more common managerial terms
between strategy formulation and strategic
implementation. At the same time, it has also
had to address a perhaps more fundamental
question: how far, at least from a demand or
market perspective, can we ever develop gen-
eral rules for achieving enduring economic
advantage.
Strategy: from formulation to
implementation
From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s at least,
management strategy seemed to be inevitably
linked to issues of product-market selection
and hence to marketing strategy. Perhaps iron-
ically this was not primarily or mainly as a
result of the contribution of marketing scholars
or indeed practitioners. The most significant
initial contributors, such as Bruce Henderson
and Michael Porter, were both to be found at or
closely linked to the Harvard Business School,
but were really informed more by particular
aspects of economic analysis: neo-marginal
economics and Industrial Organizational Eco-
nomics respectively. Labelling the intellectual
pedigree for Bruce Henderson and the Boston
Consulting Group is rather more difficult than
for Michael Porter. This is partly because much
of the approach developed out of consulting
practice (cf. Morrison and Wensley, 1991) in the
context of a broad rather than focus notion of
economic analysis. Some of the intellectual
pedigree for the approach can be found in
Henderson, who was at Harvard also, and
Quant (1958), but some basic ideas such as
dynamic economies of scale have a much
longer pedigree (see, for instance, Jones, 1926).
However, in various institutions the marketing
academics were not slow to recognize what was
going on and also to see that the centrality of
product-market choice linked well with the
importance attached to marketing. This expan-
sion of the teaching domain had a much less
significant impact on the research agenda and
activity within marketing itself, where the focus
continued to underplay the emerging impor-
tance of the competitive dimension (Day and
Wensley, 1983). Hence the relatively atheor-
etical development continued into the process