Brief History Of Strategic Marketing

Marketing scholars have suggested that strategic marketing arose in the late 1970s and its origins can be understood in terms of a distinct evolutionary path:

    Budgeting Control (also known as scientific management)

    Date: From late 19th century
    Key Thinkers: Frederick Winslow Taylor, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, Henry L. Gantt, Harrington Emerson
    Key Ideas: Emphasis on quantification and scientific modelling, reduce work to smallest possible units and assign work to specialists, exercise control through rigid managerial hierarchies, standardize inputs to reduce variation, defects and control costs, use quantitative forecasting methods to predict any changes.

    Long Range Planning

    Date: From 1950s
    Key Thinkers: Herbert A. Simon
    Key Ideas: Managerial focus was to anticipate growth and manage operations in an increasingly complex business world.

    Strategic Planning (also known as corporate planning

    Date: From the 1960s
    Key Thinkers: Michael Porter
    Key Ideas: Organizations must find the right fit within an industry structure; advantage derives from industry concentration and market power; firms should strive to achieve a monopoly or quasi-monopoly; successful firms should be able to erect barriers to entry.

    Strategic Marketing Management
    Date: from late 1970s
    Key thinkers: R. Buzzell and B. Gale
    Key Ideas: Each business is unique and that there can be no formula for achieving competitive advantage; firms should adopt a flexible planning and review process that aims to cope with strategic surprises and rapidly developing threats; management's focus is on how to deliver superior customer value; highlights the key role of marketing as the link between customers and the organization.

    Resource Based View (RBV) (also known as resource-advantage theory)

    Date: From mid 1990s
    Key Thinkers: Jay B. Barney, George S. Day, Gary Hamel, Shelby D. Hunt, G. Hooley and C.K. Prahalad
    Key Ideas: The firm's resources are financial, legal, human, organizational, informational and relational; resources are heterogeneous and imperfectly mobile, management's key task is to understand and organize resources for sustainable competitive advantage.