Strategic Marketing Management: Achieving Superior Business Performance through Intelligent Marketing Strategy

Abstract

In the age of drastic changes organizations need sustainable competitive advantage to cope with changes and to succeed. They can create, sustain and use competitive advantage through strategic management. Organizations can formulate strategies that their implementation results in sustainable competitive advantage. Marketing strategies seem to be an important type of these strategies. Traditionally, according to an integrated approach which integrates resource-based view (RBV) and market-based view, organizations could develop marketing strategies based on their internal capabilities and external position. Then they implement these strategies to create competitive advantage through their core competencies include creating value for customers, attracting and satisfying them. Marketing strategies play two important roles to sustain competitive advantage: (1) encourage customers to return (according to market-based view), and (2) create distinctive competencies through making core competencies VRIO (according to RBV). VRIO refers to Valuable, Rare, not Imitable and to be able to Organize. In today’s turbulent environment, VRIO and customer retention are necessary but not adequate to sustain competitive advantage and achieve superior performance. Then organizations must be market/customer oriented, think and act based on innovative knowledge, make a useful and long term relationship with their customers. This qualification is for those organizations that are able to be knowledge-based, formulate its marketing strategies and sustain its competitive advantage based on its own knowledge. In other words its marketing strategy is intelligent. Organizations must consider innovative knowledge as a new input to sustain competitive advantage and to develop intelligent marketing strategy (more than internal capability and external position as existing inputs). In this paper, we are going to contribute a new perspective to develop marketing strategy. It is sustaining competitive advantage and developing intelligent marketing strategy (IMS) through innovative knowledge to achieve superior performance. Accordingly we have developed a comprehensive model of Intelligent Marketing Strategy.

Keywords: Innovative knowledge (IK) - Intelligent marketing strategy (IMS) - Superior business performance - Sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) - Value creation