Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

CHAPTER 16 STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION AND INTERNAL MARKETING
16.6 
Implementation and internal marketing
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The approach we have taken in this chapter to strategy implementation and internal market-
ing attempts to emphasise that strategy cannot usefully be examined in isolation from execu-
tion – developing strategic ideas around a company’s markets achieves effectiveness only 
when placed in the context of implementation. However, when we focus on implementation, 
it is clear that we face both long-term and short-term issues. The short-term issues are what 
has mainly occupied us so far – gaining the execution of a given plan or strategy. The longer-
term issues are more concerned with management decisions aimed at avoiding the imple-
mentation problems we have considered here. 
This suggests that there is a need to consider both process management and execution 
skills in implementation. The difference is that managing the strategy process has the goal 
of integrating implementation and change issues with marketing strategy, with the goal of 
avoiding the emergence of implementation barriers. On the other hand, execution skills 
are concerned with how to manage a way though the change problems and barriers, which 
stand in the way of marketing strategy. While these are different approaches, they are not 
mutually exclusive, and in most practical situations attention will need to be paid to both. 
The underlying rationale is summarised in Figure 16.6 . There are four implementation 
scenarios suggested: weak implementation – where the management of process and execu-
tion skills are inappropriate to drive a marketing strategy; management-driven implemen-
tation – where the emphasis is on leadership and control by management to put a strategy 
into effect and to overcome problems or barriers that may exist; implementation-driven 
strategy – where the emphasis is on exploiting the capabilities of the existing organisation 
and adapting strategies to ‘fit’ with this reality; and integrated strategy and implementation – 
which achieves implementation by both managing key processes and applying manage-
ment execution skills. In facing the implementation challenges in a given situation, it can 
be useful to map positioning on this framework and to track the practical implications for 
an effective implementation strategy.
The weak implementation scenario is largely based on managers assuming that once 
plans and strategies are written, then people will go away and make them happen. Some 
managers make these assumptions implicitly in how they approach things, and fail to 
anticipate the problems when their edicts and commands are not put into effect or are 
implemented half-heartedly or haphazardly. Any marketing strategy that matters to an 
organisation deserves to have implementation taken more seriously than this. 
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This section draws on more detailed coverage of this issue in Piercy (2017) .