Marketing implementation, organizational change and internal marketing strategy 549
Management satisfaction with marketing
performance (and thus whether management
think there are marketing problems or not)
depends in large degree on what management
expectedto achieve in the first place. In short,
the argument is that, regardless of the real
potentials in the market, satisfaction or
dissatisfaction will be predicted by
management’s high or low expectations.
How much marketing effort we have to make
to get a given result depends on our skills,
competencies and structures. We may get
good results with small effort, or bad results
after massive expenditures of effort, depending
on the match between our capabilities and
market characteristics. This enormously
complicates the problem of seeing whether we
have a marketing problem or if one is on the
way.
Results depend not least on the environment –
market trends and changes, competitive
actions, and so on. Our results may look good
or bad because of factors totally outside our
control or ability to predict. We may do well
because we are in the right place at the right
time, and this may further obscure the need
for marketing changes for the future and make
it difficult to isolate marketing implementation
problems.
The underlying point is the need to think of
implementation strategies which address both
issues of inertia and understanding of the real
marketing problems. We have argued else-
where (Piercy, 2002) that building such approa-
ches to marketing implementation may involve
us in operating on the underlying decision-
making processes of the organization and its
‘inner workings’, rather than in just writing
implementation strategies. For example, to illu-
minate the marketing problem may involve
having executives and key players in the
organization work on environmental scanning
or participate in marketing planning itself, so
they discover and address the real issues, rather
than being told what they are. Similarly, over-
coming a reluctance to change may be
addressed through our internal marketing tech-
niques (see below), but we need to seek a
genuine understanding of why people in an
organization cling to the familiar and estab-
lished way of doing things. Argyris (1985), for
instance, speaks of the ‘defensive routines’ that
people build to protect themselves from the
discomfort and disruption of having to change- the ‘designed error’ in implementation pro-
cesses, such that we know things are going
wrong but choose to do nothing about it.
Testing the strategy
However, as a start, the framework in Figure
21.6 suggests a number of critical questions that
should be asked of the marketing strategy or
plan, before we assume that marketing failures
are due to a company’s low execution or
implementation skills. These questions involve
challenging:1 The completeness and coherence of the
strategy – if it is vague and missing important
details, then how can we expect it to be
implemented?
2 If the strategy is innovative and brilliant, but
beyond the company’s capabilities, then the
most we can expect is lip-service. Bonoma
(1985) outlines some of the common problems
created here as: (a) management by assumption- we assume ‘someone’ will get the detailed
work done so, in practice, no-one does it; (b)
structural contradictions– we create marketing
strategies that conflict with our systems and
structures and just expect people to cope; (c)
empty promises marketing– we build marketing
strategies and plans that rely on abilities and
resources that we have not got and cannot
get; or (d) bunny marketing– we have no clear
marketing strategy, so we create a profusion of
plans instead (Bonoma’s analogy is the man
with lots of rabbits who needed an ox, but no
matter how much he bred the rabbits, he
never seemed to end up with an ox).
3 If we have not made the effort to
communicate and to win support for the plans