تفاوت بازاریابی استراتژیک موفق در بین تولیدکنندگان در یک بازار نوظهور و توسعه یافته What differentiates successful strategic marketing among manufacturers in an emerging vs developed market?

Introduction Emerging markets, especially those in the so-called BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China (Wilson and Purushothaman, 2003), are predicted to comprehensively transform the balance of economic power worldwide by mid-century (Dobbs et al., 2012). As such, for some time now they have attracted a good deal of attention among researchers from throughout the field of business management (Khanna and Palepu, 2010). However, over recent years, due to their unique, strategically relevant situational characteristics, scholarly attention has become increasingly focused on organisational strategy, as evidenced by a substantial rise in the number of studies on this topic that have been published in the top business strategy journals (Bang, Joshi, and Singh, 2016). Marketing is considered integral to effective business-level strategic decision-making (Walker et al., 2015). It helps firms determine which market should be targeted, and how best to build superior customer value and competitive advantage over the longer-term (Hooley et al., 2017). The term ‘strategic marketing’ has long been synonymous with an ongoing multistage planning process that enables the firm to adjust its decision-making so as to adapt to a changing business environment (Brooksbank et al., 2015). The normative model of the strategic marketing planning process encompasses five stages: situation analysis, objectivesetting, strategy formulation, organisational design, and control procedures (Tybout and Calder, 2010). Interest in strategic marketing peaked in the early-mid 1980s when there was an explosion of literature on the subject (Romano and Ratnatunga, 1995). Since then numerous ‘success’ studies (almost exclusively carried out in developed markets) have illustrated an appreciation of marketing’s contribution to firm performance as a strategic discipline. This body of work includes research that examines different types and sizes of firms operating in different markets and from differing research perspectives or ‘genres’ (Brooksbank, Garland and Taylor, 2010). Of the differing ‘research genres’ employed, arguably the most readily measurable from a scholar’s perspective is the ‘strategic marketing practices’ genre (Brooksbank, Garland and Taylor, 2008). Here, the focus is on assessing organisational decision-making as it relates to various tasks within each of the five stages of the normative model of the strategic marketing planning process. Accordingly, a comprehensive literature review (see below) revealed a total of 18 of the most commonly reported successful strategic marketing practices (SMPs) relating to these five stages. Set against this background, the paper will next proceed to explain the purpose and objectives of the current study.