1
Strategic Marketing: Situation Analysis and Competitive Success
Ron Garland, Roger Brooksbank, University of Waikato
Abstract
Interest in strategic marketing as a means of improving competitiveness at the individual firm
level has continued from its heyday in the 1980s. Irrespective of location in the world, of
industrial context, of size of firm, etc, almost all studies emphasise the contribution, directly
or indirectly, of strategic marketing to competitive success. Thus, based on comparisons
between two mail surveys ten years apart (1997 and 2007), this paper explores the extent to
which one aspect (the strategic situation analysis) of strategic marketing has contributed to
the competitive success of larger (20 or more employees) New Zealand companies. Ten years
on, our findings show that these companies now pay more attention to conducting a situation
analysis as part of their overall strategic marketing planning efforts. Further, we affirm
conventional wisdom: strategic marketing planning still contributes to competitive success.
Introduction, Literature and Objectives
Since the mid 1980s, not only have many European and North American studies shown the
important contribution of a number of basic strategic marketing practices to the achievement
of company success, but there has also been a plethora of prescriptive-style books and articles
on the subject, and a strong surge of interest in marketing as a means of improving
competitiveness at the individual firm level (Brooksbank and Taylor, 1999). Yet another
stream of the literature has been concerned with the adoption of the marketing concept (see
for example, Shapiro 1988; Kohli and Jaworski 1990; Narver and Slater 1990; and Deng and
Dart 1994) and, depending on the definitions employed, much of this work has also addressed
a number of issues related to strategic marketing and examined its effects on business
performance. There is consensus among commentators as to the relevant stages of the
strategic marketing planning process. For example, Brooksbank (1996) and Hooley and
Greenley (2005), focus on four key stages: analysing; strategising; implementing; controlling.
The strategic marketing practice research alluded to here tends to support the notion that
strategic marketing planning and business ‘success’ (irrespective of how success is measured)
are positively correlated (see Table 1). Yet measuring this correlation, or even the direction of
causality, has proved difficult and commentators such as Pulendran, Speed and Widing
(2003) suggest that these relationships are indirect and context specific. (Limited space
precludes a more in-depth review of this literature.) The notion that strategic marketing
planning and business ‘success’ are correlated spawns our paper’s over-arching objectives: