The Teaching of Marketing Strategy

Marketing has long been thought of in terms of McCarthy’s 4P’s: that is, the “controllable” marketing decisions of product policy, pricing, distribution, and promotion. Strategic marketing management, in contrast, has not been similarly encapsulated. The foci of marketing strategy are those critically important “uncontrollables”: customers and competitors. The consequence is an imbalance in the perception of marketing among many business people and students of marketing in favor of more controllable, day to day “mix” management to the detriment of less controllable but equally important, competitor-related strategic marketing thinking. In the author’s view, this is undesirable given the needs of contemporary business and therefore should be rectified in marketing education. The author offers academic marketers a framework with which they can convey the essence of marketing strategy as memorably and therefore as effectively as the marketing mix.