Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Product push marketing. Under this approach, firms focus activities on existing products 
and services, and look for ways to encourage or even persuade customers to buy. This is 
a myopic interpretation of the resource-based view: we have a resource (our product or 
service) that we are good at producing, and that is different from what competitors offer. 
The key notion underpinning this approach is to make customers want what we are good 
at. Car dealerships and their supply chain present good examples of push marketing. 
Dealers are often given favourable incentives based on volume targets that culminate in 
significant financial payments based on numbers of cars sold, as are sales people. In this 
setting it is very much in everyone’s interests to ‘push’ cars through the supply chain to 
the customer.
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Customer-led marketing. The other extreme is customer-led marketing (Slater, 1998). 
Under this approach, organisations chase their customers at all costs. The goal is to find 
what customers want and, whatever it is, give it to them. This can also lead to problems. 
Being excessively customer led can lead to a short-term orientation, resulting in trivial 
incremental product development efforts and myopic research and development (R&D) 
(Frosch, 1996). Christensen and Bower (1996) go further, suggesting that ‘firms lose their 
Figure 1.3
Marketing 
approaches
Market needs
Customer-led
marketing
Product push
marketing
Resource-based
marketing
Organisational capabilities

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14
CHAPTER 1 MARKET-LED STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT
position of industry leadership . . . because they listen too carefully to their customers’. 
(See earlier discussion regarding the importance of organisations being market driven 
and market driving.)
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