Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Figure 16.6 
Integrating strategy 
and implementation 
processes
Stronger
execution
skills
Weaker
execution
skills
Higher level
of process
management
Lower level
of process
management
Integrated
strategy and
implementation
Management-
driven
implementation
Implementation-
driven
strategy
Weak
implementation

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SUMMARY
The management-driven implementation scenario is probably closest to the traditional 
view of how things should be managed. The emphasis is on line management to take charge, 
to overcome obstacles, to lead, to coerce and to make things happen – it relies on high-
quality management execution skills to overcome implementation barriers. It is fast to put 
into practice and in the short term may achieve change, but the problem is it lacks longer-
term effectiveness in sustaining change. 
The implementation-driven strategy scenario is where the focus of market strategies 
is dominated by exploiting existing capabilities and skills in the organisation, mainly by 
adapting market strategies to ‘fit’ with the organisation’s existing competencies. This is also 
fast to be put into effect, and will keep implementation costs low. It is weaker in achieving 
strategic change because the emphasis is on exploiting what we already have, not developing 
new capabilities – this is fine until the point when our capabilities do not provide what the 
market wants, thus our strategy becomes outdated by market change. 
The integrated strategy and implementation scenario is the ideal to which we aspire. 
Implementation is not an issue because it is fully integrated with the market strategy, and we 
are not forced to cling to existing skills and processes because part of developing strategy is 
developing the appropriate processes, structures, skills and capabilities to drive the strategy. 
It is slower to achieve and expensive, and in the short term not outstandingly effective, but 
it is probably the only route to long-term sustained strategic change. It is also the scenario 
we understand least well, and rarely find in practice. 
Understanding the reality of the implementation scenario faced and the implications of 
the approaches adopted by management provides insights into problems likely to be faced, 
and a foundation for planning a longer-term strategy to enhance implementation capabili-
ties in a company.
Summary 
The focus of this chapter is strategy implementation – the transition from plans to execution. 
Strategy implementation faces a variety of obstacles and poses several important challenges 
for marketing executives. Part of the challenge is to avoid the separation of strategy and imple-
mentation and to recognise their interdependence. We take the increasingly widespread view 
that part of thinking about implementing competitive marketing strategy should be concerned 
with managing the internal market (of employees, functional specialists, managers and so on), 
because this may enhance a company’s ability to deliver its strategies to customers in the 
external market. In part, this view is based on the recognition of the importance of relationship 
management with partners, achieving competition differentiation through the skills of the ‘part-
time marketers’ in the organisation and the role of internal branding to parallel external branding. 
We saw that internal marketing may be traced back to early views about the synergy between 
the marketing concept and the ‘human relations’ concept, and to have developed operationally 
in a variety of ways. The scope of internal marketing was seen to encompass service quality 
enhancement, internal communications programmes, managing the adoption of innovations 
inside an organisation, cross-functional and cross-divisional supply of products and services 
and a framework for marketing implementation. Our interest here is primarily, though not exclu-
sively, in strategic internal marketing as a framework for managing implementation. 
In this area we saw that internal marketing offers a framework for evaluating the costs of 
change and for managing change that utilises the same concepts, terminology and techniques 
as planning external marketing. This provides a pragmatic model for guiding implementation 
choices and actions. 
The last part of the chapter gave attention to the more process-based view of internal 
marketing, which focuses on integration of company efforts around customer value creation, 
and the challenges of forming cross-functional partnerships to deliver marketing strategy to 
the marketplace. We examined the potentials for internal marketing efforts to build closer ties 
Summary 

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