Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

CHAPTER 6 UNDERSTANDING THE ORGANISATIONAL RESOURCE BASE
dynamic marketing capabilities are the ability to create new marketing resources to identify, 
respond to and exploit change. Ensuring evolutionary fit between market needs in a dynamic 
competitive environment and market offers is the essence of effective strategic marketing.
Following the typology suggested by Wang and Ahmed (2007), we group dynamic capa-
bilities into three main types: absorptive capability, adaptive capability and innovative 
capability (see Figure 6.7).
6.6.1 Absorptive marketing capabilities
Absorptive capabilities are the processes that enable firms to recognise the value of new 
information from the market and to assimilate it. These processes focus on knowledge 
acquisition and assimilation.
Market-sensing capability
The capability to understand what is happening in the external environment with respect 
to demand, customers, competitors and wider macro-environmental change is essential to 
crafting an effective strategy in a changing market (see Foley and Fahy, 2004).
Specific market-sensing capabilities include the ability to undertake (or effectively com-
mission) marketing research and competitor analysis, and the ability to ensure dissemina-
tion of the resulting information throughout the organisation as a basis for decision making.
Market sensing is not limited, however, to the conduct of formal market research. Famously, 
Akio Morita, founder of Sony, sensed that there was a potential market for the Walkman when 
the market research told him otherwise. Market sensing implies being close to the customer 
and experiencing products and services in the same way that the customer experiences them. 
Firms operating in business-to-business (B2B) markets may have particular customers that they 
are especially close to with whom they will discuss new product development opportunities.