Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Corporate culture
One of the resources that is hard for competitors to imitate, and can be particularly distinctive 
of a company, is its culture. The formation of culture and the capacity to learn are complex 
issues, and for many successful companies culture represents a unique resource. For example, 
Hewlett-Packard (HP) has a culture that encourages teamwork and cross-functional and cross-
divisional working. This has allowed HP to use its core technologies in many diverse products – 
printers, plotters, computers, electronic instruments – and to make these products compatible. 
Competitors can certainly imitate HP’s technology relatively easily, but it is far less straight-
forward to imitate the culture and organisation that underpins HP’s marketing effectiveness.
6.4.4 Alliance-based marketing assets
All the assets discussed previously can be held internally in the firm itself, or gained through 
strategic alliances and partnerships. Although there are strategic risks involved, alliances 
can be seen as one way of increasing a company’s pool of assets and capabilities without 
incurring the expense and loss of time in developing them in-house. The importance of 
strategic alliances and different forms of partnership is discussed in detail in Chapter 15, 

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CHAPTER 6 UNDERSTANDING THE ORGANISATIONAL RESOURCE BASE
but for present purposes we should note the significance of such alliance-based marketing 
assets as: 
● 
Market access – for example, alliances with local distributors are frequently the only 
way open to the exporter to enter protected overseas markets.
● 
Management skills – partnerships may bring access to abilities not held in-house, both 
in technology management and marketing management.
● 
Shared technology – alliances are often the basis for sharing and combining technolo-
gies to create market offerings with higher customer value, which neither partner could 
achieve alone.
●