CHAPTER 21
Marketing implementation,
organizational change and
internal marketing strategy
NIGEL F. PIERCY
Introduction
Marketing executives in the twenty-first cen-
tury face complex and turbulent markets, with
ever-more demanding and sophisticated cus-
tomers, new types of competition emerging
from multiple sources, multiple channels
reflecting the impact of Internet marketing,
new technologies impacting on product obso-
lescence, urgent globalization imperatives, and
radical shifts in the type of buyer–seller rela-
tionships required to deliver value to the
customer. While developing and planning
effective and innovative marketing strategies to
prosper in these fiercely competitive conditions
is a major challenge, it remains unavoidably
true that the capability to execute strategies
effectively is a critical requirement. Now more
than ever before, the successful companies are
those who get things done to deliver superior
value to customers. For example, Dell Com-
puters is widely admired for its direct business
model and sophisticated Internet marketing.
One of Dell’s hidden capabilities is rapid and
effective response to customer needs – when
the US military complex at the Pentagon was
attacked by terrorists on 11 September 2001,
many computers and servers were damaged,
yet Dell had replaced all damaged equipment
at the Pentagon within 48 hours of the loss. The
most central point to be made in this chapter is
that one of the most significant challenges for
marketing is implementation, but also, by impli-
cation, the organizational changes that are
required to achieve the effective implementa-
tion of marketing strategies and programmes.
Perhaps the most central issue here is the
manager’s pragmatic question: ‘We know what
marketingis, but how do we do it?’ In his now
classic treatment of the implementation issue in
marketing, Tom Bonoma (1985) summarized
the problem in the following way:Marketing for a number of years has been long
on advice about what to doin a given com-
petitive or market situation and short on useful
recommendations for how to do itwithin com-
pany, competitor and customer constraints...
experiences with both managers and students
argue strongly that these parties and customer
constraints are often strategy-sophisticated and
implementation-bound.