Latest newsPapers about strategy across all industries
Submitted by Visitor on Mon, 09/03/2009 - 11:43
Published articles that address significant issues concerning strategic marketing planning.
Professor Brian D Smith describes how marketing in knowledge-based industries is different from other businesses.
The problem of strategy non-implementation is important and complex but poorly understood. This paper published in the Journal of Strategic Marketing explores the explanatory value of theories regarding intraorganisational conflict. It concludes that certain concepts from this area, when augmented with ideas from the social psychology literature and empirical observations of marketing’s interface with other functions, help our understanding of marketing strategy implementation. This may form the basis of future work towards improving the understanding and management of strategy implementation.
The full title of this article, published in the Journal of Strategic Marketing, is Maybe I Will, Maybe I Won't: what the connected perspectives of motivation theory and organisational commitment may contribute to our understanding of strategy implementation. This paper reviews the management problem of marketing strategy implementation and proposes some new perspectives on the subject. It finds that the well-developed research into motivation theory and organisational commitment theory offer useful perspectives on strategy implementation. As an academic paper, it also suggests five postulates and accompanying hypotheses for future empirical work.
Dr Brian D. Smith and Lindsay Bruce look at how sales teams can make key account and key opinion leader strategies work.
Writing a strategic marketing plan often begins with situation analysis - the examination of what is going on in the market. Typically, marketers spend more time looking at the task environment (customers, channels, competitors etc.) than the remote environment of social, legal, economic, political, and technological factors. This often leads to plans being written to suit yesterday’s market rather than today’s. Dr Brian Smith and Baba Awopetu discuss how to avoid this mistake by using SLEPT analysis in a structured and effective way.
The proper use and great strengths of the SWOT analysis.
Dr Brian D Smith, a visiting Research Fellow in the Marketing and Strategy Research Unit at the OU Business School, clears away some of the confusion about what 'strategy' is and what a good one looks like.
The fashion for business metrics has led to many advances. But 'balanced scorecards' have their faults. Can we improve on the system? Dr Brian Smith and Professor Keith Ward discuss.
We've all been taught how to be market-led but making it happen is a different matter. New research sheds light on the problem of marketing implementation.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) projects often fail. Dr Brian Smith, Professor Moira Clark and Professor Hugh Wilson focus on the project justification process as one way of improving project success rates. They review how the typical combination of an Return On Investment (ROI) calculation and a project plan can have flaws as a project justification approach, and propose the use of the Benefits Dependency Network (BDN) as an additional tool. The second part of the paper reports on an exploratory study of the BDN's use in five business-to-business CRM projects.
The phenomenal rise of the Chinese economy means many Western business plans now involve either selling to China or competing with Chinese-supplied competitors. Dr Brian Smith and Abigail Jones shed light on how an understanding of the success of the ethnic Chinese is important to competitive strategy.
The war for talent is intensifying, driven by globalisation and the shift to a knowledge based economy. An effective, strategic approach to Human Resources issues is seen by organisations as a necessary precondition for sustainable competitive advantage. Within HR strategy, employer branding is a powerful component capable of helping recruitment, retention and employee engagement. Effective employer branding is based on genuine values and achieved by high-integrity implementation as outlined in this report by Dr Brian Smith published in the Sunday Times.
Dr Brian Smith looks at what marketing excellence is and how to get there.
What constitutes a great leader? The Venturer speaks to two leading business researchers (Dr Brian Smith and Professor Keith Ward) and finds out.
Dr Brian Smith unravels what strategy is and how to tell the good from the bad.
There isn't an ideal way of making strategy. The best will fully rreflect a firm's culture and external relationships.
The Finnish Magazine 'Factor' interviews Dr Brian Smith about what customer orientation is - now and in the future.
John Ling reveals which marketing books have sold well in 2006 and recommends his top ten from the diverse selection on offer, naming "Marketing Due Diligence" as his personal top pick of the year.
This review of Making Marketing Happen which appeared in the Journal of Medical Marketing concludes: 'All in all, this is an excellent book and I am looking forward reading the second edition ... Congratulations to Dr Smith for writing such a valuable treatise.'
The tools for assessing business risk are inadequate. Yet, in order to judge the probable return on capital, some form of measurement is necessary. Smith, Ward and McDonald describe the 'Marketing Due Diligence' process, which assesses the probability of a marketing strategy delivering its promises in order to calculate whether the plan would create or destroy shareholder value.
Guarding the brand is an Economist Intelligence Unit briefing paper, sponsored by SDL International. It covers the results of an international survey of 145 senior executives from range of industries and shares and analyses their insights into the brand challenges they face.
Turning data into value is difficult, but new research reveals how leading firms manage it. Dr Brian Smith, Dr Hugh Wilson and Professor Moira Clark reveal the secrets of success
There are three levels of marketing accountability and great marketers understand them all. Applying rigour at all three levels is what distinguishes a great marketing company from the less great.
Novas pesquisas revelam como e que as grandes empresas fazem com que o planeamento de marketing estrate gico resulte com elas
Many marketing strategies destroy shareholder value instead of creating it. In this interview in The Marketer, Dr Brian Smith and his co-authors of Marketing Due Diligence discuss the causes and cures for this worrying situation.
This is a report of the Cranfield Customer Management Forum's work in 2004/5.
Few companies today would define themselves as anything other than knowledge-based. For knowledge-based marketers, the critical issue is how knowledge leads to market insight, drives offer development and creates value. Previous work at Cranfield has defined CRM practice as the use of individual customer data to drive value.
This previous work has also defined the necessary preconditions for effective CRM and the way successful firms adapt CRM to fit their situation. However, this raised further questions, especially about the detail of how firms use data to create value.
As a result, the members of the Cranfield Customer Management Forum asked that this topic be studied further to provide recommendations for best practice in this field.
This task was addressed in two phases, starting with a comprehensive review of previously published research and then testing and probing those areas where the previous work was lacking or unclear. It did so by means of 13 in-depth interviews with firms who were heavily involved in the data-to-value process.
In short, this study reveals that creating value from data has all the difficulty of 'traditional', less data-dependent strategy making and some additional challenges. Far from being made easier by information technology, it is made more difficult by the need to find, aggregate and synthesise sources of data that are more numerous and more diverse than in traditional value-creating processes. It is, however, that greater difficulty that promises both greater and more sustainable competitive advantage and hence value.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. Nowhere is this old business saying more true than in strategic planning. Almost all newly-qualified managers face a terrific culture shock when they find that their marketing planning textbooks, even if they are a good prescription, are a very poor description of the reality of business practice. This article is a good introductory summary to Dr Brian Smith's book "Making Marketing Happen".
Marketing text books are mostly written for mega-corporations who sell to consumers. But what about small businesses who have to sell to giant companies? Just follow nine steps to marketing effectiveness say Lindsay Bruce and Dr Brian Smith
Anna Ronay of The Marketer asks Dr Smith about the divide between marketing theory and what happens in real companies. Have the textbooks have got it wrong, or is marketing really as misunderstood as it appears to be? And how can marketers bridge the gap between the way marketing should be practised and what happens in the real world?
Without good segmentation, all your marketing, from product design to pricing to promotion, is doomed to mediocrity. Whole books are written about the detail of segmentation, but success starts with the fundamentals.
Investors constantly seek to estimate the likelihood of a business plan delivering its promises, whilst the boards try to demonstrate the strength of their strategy. New research provides insight and tools to do both.
Investors and corporate financiers usually find it hard to assess the shareholder value of a company’s marketing strategies. However, Professor Keith Ward, Professor Malcolm McDonald and Dr Brian Smith of Cranfield School of Management have developed a process that makes this task easier.
Is your planned business strategy strong enough to win in a competitive market? To gain investor confidence directors need a way of demonstrating the true value of their business. New research from Cranfield School of Management gives them a tool that does just that, say Dr Brian Smith, Professor Malcolm McDonald and Professor Keith Ward.
Why is it that some companies make marketing happen and others don't? What do the good companies do that the rest of us don't? Great companies have learned how to mould strategic marketing planning to their situation and, as a result, create strong marketing strategies that deliver results. Dr Brian Smith explains why some companies do and some companies don't make great marketing happen.
This is a report of the Cranfield CRM Research Forum's work in 2002/3.
The research agenda, shaped and agreed by the Forum's members, was designed to further the group';s aim to facilitate excellence in CRM. As such, it sought to answer three research questions that arose from the earlier research, namely:
a) What is the most effective way to organise for CRM?
b) What is the best way to justify CRM investment?
c) How can CRM analytics be improved?
The implications of this work for practitioners are wide ranging and important. CRM is best implemented by the deliberated management of cross functional teams, varied according to project stage and recognising key HR and management prerequisites. CRM is best justified by a process specific to the company involved. Managers can best achieve justification by adapting that process to the internal context of the company. CRM analytics can be improved by the application of motivationally based segmentation. However, the optimal level of value creation is dependent upon data acquisition that is atypical of many organisations.
Dr Brian Smith explains how real market segments can be uncovered. The key is to understand what drives customer behaviour.
CRM is plagued by reports of its failure and lack of visible returns. This article shares the results of important research which reveals that, while most fail, a few companies have made a fundamental shift in practice, thereby creating shareholders and customer value.
Dr Brian Smith, Professor Malcolm McDonald and Professor Keith Ward reveal a new process which may help get marketing into the boardroom.
Is Customer Relationship Management an important strategic methodology or just another management fad that should be consigned immediately to the out-tray? Taking time to address some of the more basic questions will pay dividends in establishing a clear, common starting point when deciding whether CRM can benefit your organisation.
Dr Moira Clark and Dr Brian Smith, leaders of the highly regarded Cranfield CRM Research Forum report on its latest findings, which reveal the much-maligned customer management tool is at a critical crossroads.
Dr Brian Smith puts the case for marketing planning - what it is, what it isn't and how to explain it to non-marketing colleagues.
Dr Brian Smith and Professor Malcolm McDonald reveal how to use Strategy Diagnostics to test the strength of your marketing strategy before it is implemented.
This is a report of the Cranfield CRM Research Forum's work in 2001/2, the first year of its operation. The work of the Forum is based upon a research programme that includes both primary and secondary research. The secondary research was used to synthesise a generic model of CRM which broadly but accurately describes the management process better than previous models. This model allows practitioners to understand and create the necessary preconditions for successful CRM in any organisation. It also makes explicit the inputs, outputs and connectivity of the four sub-processes of CRM. The primary research revealed that effective CRM operates within a CRM eco-system defined by both market and organisationally based factors. Awareness of this eco-system allows organisations to avoid wasteful investment in CRM when it is not appropriate to their business situation. The primary research further revealed the evolution of the basic CRM process into five sub-species, each of which was optimally adapted to its particular place in the CRM eco-system. Understanding of this differentiation allows practitioners to define the optimal CRM process for their own situation. This report is in two parts: Firstly, a management report summarising the results of the research; secondly a manual based upon the work. The manual, including software tools, facilitates the development of a CRM process optimised for the particular market and organisational conditions of the reader.
Corporate culture is the biggest barrier to effective marketing and attempts to manage it often fail. Dr Brian Smith reveals how 'going with the grain' is often the better way.
Dr Brian Smith and Dr Moira Clark outline the critical factors for successful customer relationship management. The trick, as ever, is to deduce the sense from the hype which, through a rigorous research programme, is what Cranfield University’s CRM Research Forum aims to achieve.
This is a report of the Cranfield CRM Research Forum's work in 2001/2, the first year of its operation. The work of the Forum is based upon a research programme that includes both primary and secondary research. The secondary research was used to synthesise a generic model of CRM which broadly but accurately describes the management process better than previous models. This model allows practitioners to understand and create the necessary preconditions for successful CRM in any organisation. It also makes explicit the inputs, outputs and connectivity of the four sub-processes of CRM. The primary research revealed that effective CRM operates within a CRM eco-system defined by both market and organisationally based factors. Awareness of this eco-system allows organisations to avoid wasteful investment in CRM when it is not appropriate to their business situation. The primary research further revealed the evolution of the basic CRM process into five sub-species, each of which was optimally adapted to its particular place in the CRM eco-system. Understanding of this differentiation allows practitioners to define the optimal CRM process for their own situation. This report is in two parts: Firstly, a management report summarising the results of the research; secondly a manual based upon the work. The manual, including software tools, facilitates the development of a CRM process optimised for the particular market and organisational conditions of the reader.
Novas pesquisas revelam como e que as grandes empresas fazem com que o planeamento de marketing estrate gico resulte com elas
John Ling reveals which marketing books have sold well in 2006 and recommends his top ten from the diverse selection on offer, naming "Marketing Due Diligence" as his personal top pick of the year.
Dr Brian Smith and Dr Moira Clark outline the critical factors for successful customer relationship management. The trick, as ever, is to deduce the sense from the hype which, through a rigorous research programme, is what Cranfield University’s CRM Research Forum aims to achieve.
This review of Making Marketing Happen which appeared in the Journal of Medical Marketing concludes: 'All in all, this is an excellent book and I am looking forward reading the second edition ... Congratulations to Dr Smith for writing such a valuable treatise.'
Is Customer Relationship Management an important strategic methodology or just another management fad that should be consigned immediately to the out-tray? Taking time to address some of the more basic questions will pay dividends in establishing a clear, common starting point when deciding whether CRM can benefit your organisation.
The phenomenal rise of the Chinese economy means many Western business plans now involve either selling to China or competing with Chinese-supplied competitors. Dr Brian Smith and Abigail Jones shed light on how an understanding of the success of the ethnic Chinese is important to competitive strategy.
Corporate culture is the biggest barrier to effective marketing and attempts to manage it often fail. Dr Brian Smith reveals how 'going with the grain' is often the better way.
The Finnish Magazine 'Factor' interviews Dr Brian Smith about what customer orientation is - now and in the future.
CRM is plagued by reports of its failure and lack of visible returns. This article shares the results of important research which reveals that, while most fail, a few companies have made a fundamental shift in practice, thereby creating shareholders and customer value.
There are three levels of marketing accountability and great marketers understand them all. Applying rigour at all three levels is what distinguishes a great marketing company from the less great.
The war for talent is intensifying, driven by globalisation and the shift to a knowledge based economy. An effective, strategic approach to Human Resources issues is seen by organisations as a necessary precondition for sustainable competitive advantage. Within HR strategy, employer branding is a powerful component capable of helping recruitment, retention and employee engagement. Effective employer branding is based on genuine values and achieved by high-integrity implementation as outlined in this report by Dr Brian Smith published in the Sunday Times.
What constitutes a great leader? The Venturer speaks to two leading business researchers (Dr Brian Smith and Professor Keith Ward) and finds out.
This is a report of the Cranfield Customer Management Forum's work in 2004/5.
Few companies today would define themselves as anything other than knowledge-based. For knowledge-based marketers, the critical issue is how knowledge leads to market insight, drives offer development and creates value. Previous work at Cranfield has defined CRM practice as the use of individual customer data to drive value.
This previous work has also defined the necessary preconditions for effective CRM and the way successful firms adapt CRM to fit their situation. However, this raised further questions, especially about the detail of how firms use data to create value.
As a result, the members of the Cranfield Customer Management Forum asked that this topic be studied further to provide recommendations for best practice in this field.
This task was addressed in two phases, starting with a comprehensive review of previously published research and then testing and probing those areas where the previous work was lacking or unclear. It did so by means of 13 in-depth interviews with firms who were heavily involved in the data-to-value process.
In short, this study reveals that creating value from data has all the difficulty of 'traditional', less data-dependent strategy making and some additional challenges. Far from being made easier by information technology, it is made more difficult by the need to find, aggregate and synthesise sources of data that are more numerous and more diverse than in traditional value-creating processes. It is, however, that greater difficulty that promises both greater and more sustainable competitive advantage and hence value.
Dr Brian Smith explains how real market segments can be uncovered. The key is to understand what drives customer behaviour.
Guarding the brand is an Economist Intelligence Unit briefing paper, sponsored by SDL International. It covers the results of an international survey of 145 senior executives from range of industries and shares and analyses their insights into the brand challenges they face.
The proper use and great strengths of the SWOT analysis.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. Nowhere is this old business saying more true than in strategic planning. Almost all newly-qualified managers face a terrific culture shock when they find that their marketing planning textbooks, even if they are a good prescription, are a very poor description of the reality of business practice. This article is a good introductory summary to Dr Brian Smith's book "Making Marketing Happen".
Investors constantly seek to estimate the likelihood of a business plan delivering its promises, whilst the boards try to demonstrate the strength of their strategy. New research provides insight and tools to do both.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) projects often fail. Dr Brian Smith, Professor Moira Clark and Professor Hugh Wilson focus on the project justification process as one way of improving project success rates. They review how the typical combination of an Return On Investment (ROI) calculation and a project plan can have flaws as a project justification approach, and propose the use of the Benefits Dependency Network (BDN) as an additional tool. The second part of the paper reports on an exploratory study of the BDN's use in five business-to-business CRM projects.
Why is it that some companies make marketing happen and others don't? What do the good companies do that the rest of us don't? Great companies have learned how to mould strategic marketing planning to their situation and, as a result, create strong marketing strategies that deliver results. Dr Brian Smith explains why some companies do and some companies don't make great marketing happen.
Dr Brian Smith, Professor Malcolm McDonald and Professor Keith Ward reveal a new process which may help get marketing into the boardroom.
Investors and corporate financiers usually find it hard to assess the shareholder value of a company’s marketing strategies. However, Professor Keith Ward, Professor Malcolm McDonald and Dr Brian Smith of Cranfield School of Management have developed a process that makes this task easier.
The full title of this article, published in the Journal of Strategic Marketing, is Maybe I Will, Maybe I Won't: what the connected perspectives of motivation theory and organisational commitment may contribute to our understanding of strategy implementation. This paper reviews the management problem of marketing strategy implementation and proposes some new perspectives on the subject. It finds that the well-developed research into motivation theory and organisational commitment theory offer useful perspectives on strategy implementation. As an academic paper, it also suggests five postulates and accompanying hypotheses for future empirical work.
The fashion for business metrics has led to many advances. But 'balanced scorecards' have their faults. Can we improve on the system? Dr Brian Smith and Professor Keith Ward discuss.
The tools for assessing business risk are inadequate. Yet, in order to judge the probable return on capital, some form of measurement is necessary. Smith, Ward and McDonald describe the 'Marketing Due Diligence' process, which assesses the probability of a marketing strategy delivering its promises in order to calculate whether the plan would create or destroy shareholder value.
Dr Brian Smith puts the case for marketing planning - what it is, what it isn't and how to explain it to non-marketing colleagues.
Marketing text books are mostly written for mega-corporations who sell to consumers. But what about small businesses who have to sell to giant companies? Just follow nine steps to marketing effectiveness say Lindsay Bruce and Dr Brian Smith
Writing a strategic marketing plan often begins with situation analysis - the examination of what is going on in the market. Typically, marketers spend more time looking at the task environment (customers, channels, competitors etc.) than the remote environment of social, legal, economic, political, and technological factors. This often leads to plans being written to suit yesterday’s market rather than today’s. Dr Brian Smith and Baba Awopetu discuss how to avoid this mistake by using SLEPT analysis in a structured and effective way.
Is your planned business strategy strong enough to win in a competitive market? To gain investor confidence directors need a way of demonstrating the true value of their business. New research from Cranfield School of Management gives them a tool that does just that, say Dr Brian Smith, Professor Malcolm McDonald and Professor Keith Ward.
Professor Brian D Smith describes how marketing in knowledge-based industries is different from other businesses.
Dr Brian Smith unravels what strategy is and how to tell the good from the bad.
There isn't an ideal way of making strategy. The best will fully rreflect a firm's culture and external relationships.
Dr Brian Smith and Professor Malcolm McDonald reveal how to use Strategy Diagnostics to test the strength of your marketing strategy before it is implemented.
We've all been taught how to be market-led but making it happen is a different matter. New research sheds light on the problem of marketing implementation.
Turning data into value is difficult, but new research reveals how leading firms manage it. Dr Brian Smith, Dr Hugh Wilson and Professor Moira Clark reveal the secrets of success
Many marketing strategies destroy shareholder value instead of creating it. In this interview in The Marketer, Dr Brian Smith and his co-authors of Marketing Due Diligence discuss the causes and cures for this worrying situation.
Without good segmentation, all your marketing, from product design to pricing to promotion, is doomed to mediocrity. Whole books are written about the detail of segmentation, but success starts with the fundamentals.
Anna Ronay of The Marketer asks Dr Smith about the divide between marketing theory and what happens in real companies. Have the textbooks have got it wrong, or is marketing really as misunderstood as it appears to be? And how can marketers bridge the gap between the way marketing should be practised and what happens in the real world?
The problem of strategy non-implementation is important and complex but poorly understood. This paper published in the Journal of Strategic Marketing explores the explanatory value of theories regarding intraorganisational conflict. It concludes that certain concepts from this area, when augmented with ideas from the social psychology literature and empirical observations of marketing’s interface with other functions, help our understanding of marketing strategy implementation. This may form the basis of future work towards improving the understanding and management of strategy implementation.
Dr Brian D. Smith and Lindsay Bruce look at how sales teams can make key account and key opinion leader strategies work.
This is a report of the Cranfield CRM Research Forum's work in 2002/3.
The research agenda, shaped and agreed by the Forum's members, was designed to further the group';s aim to facilitate excellence in CRM. As such, it sought to answer three research questions that arose from the earlier research, namely:
a) What is the most effective way to organise for CRM?
b) What is the best way to justify CRM investment?
c) How can CRM analytics be improved?
The implications of this work for practitioners are wide ranging and important. CRM is best implemented by the deliberated management of cross functional teams, varied according to project stage and recognising key HR and management prerequisites. CRM is best justified by a process specific to the company involved. Managers can best achieve justification by adapting that process to the internal context of the company. CRM analytics can be improved by the application of motivationally based segmentation. However, the optimal level of value creation is dependent upon data acquisition that is atypical of many organisations.
Dr Brian D Smith, a visiting Research Fellow in the Marketing and Strategy Research Unit at the OU Business School, clears away some of the confusion about what 'strategy' is and what a good one looks like.
Dr Brian Smith looks at what marketing excellence is and how to get there.
Dr Moira Clark and Dr Brian Smith, leaders of the highly regarded Cranfield CRM Research Forum report on its latest findings, which reveal the much-maligned customer management tool is at a critical crossroads.
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