534 The Marketing Book
explicit implementation framework of internal
marketing to provide a parallel to more con-
ventional external marketing strategy.
Organizational stretch and implementation capabilities
Implementation capabilities
Perhaps the greatest single danger in under-
estimating the marketing implementation
issue is that we assume it away – we believe
that any company can implement any strategy,
if we simply ‘manage’ properly. Traditional
approaches to implementation are particularly
susceptible to this trap. In conventional
approaches, if we think about implementation
at all, then we see it as the logistics of getting
things ‘organized’:
We focus on developing the organizational
arrangements needed for the new strategy –
allocating responsibilities across departments
and units, and possibly creating new
organizational structures where necessary.
We allocate resources in the form of budgets
and headcount to support the activities
underpinning the strategy to the appropriate
part of the organization.
We produce ‘action lists’ and ‘action plans’, and
do presentations to tell people the way things
are going to be done.
We develop control systems to monitor
outcome performance in sales, market share,
profit and so on, to evaluate the success of the
strategy, and to take remedial action if things
are not turning out how we wanted them.
There are very substantial problems in
approaching implementation in this way. First,
it is illogical to plan strategies that are not
firmly rooted in the organization’s capabilities,
and yet we seem to set up planning systems
to do precisely this. Second, organizational
arrangements and resource allocation are
important, but on their own they are very
weak, and usually very slow, approaches to
the organizational change inherent in many
new strategies. Third, outcomes likes sales,
market share and profit are what we want to
achieve, but the driver of these outcomes is
likely to be the behaviour of people in the
organization who impact on what the cus-
tomer receives in service and quality, which
suggests we should manage the behaviour, not
just the outcomes.
It is all too easy to underestimate how
serious the consequences may be of designing
robust and well-researched innovative market
strategies that are a poor fit with our capabil-
ities, systems and policies. We have described
in some detail elsewhere the failure of a market
segmentation strategy in a commercial bank
(Piercy and Morgan, 1993). This failure was
because an innovative, new segmentation
scheme based on customer benefits was incom-
patible with the organizational structure, infor-
mation systems and culture of the company.
Reading through this case example may pro-
vide some new insights into the problems with
new market strategies.
In fact, a starting point in taking organiza-
tional and behavioural realities seriously may
be to recognize that implementation capabil-
ities are a corporate resource of some impor-
tance – but one which is not generally well
understood. In fact, a company’s implementa-
tion capabilities may be: time specific, in the sense that a company may
gain or lose the competencies on which a
strategy relies for execution, so
implementation capabilities change;
culture specific, where components of a
strategy assume understanding and abilities
that do not exist in other cultures, perhaps
exemplified best by the belief that different
countries have equal access to employees
able and willing to deliver high levels of
customer service;
partial, since a company may be well equipped,
for example, to launch a product and provide