Editorial

Citation

Crosier, K. (2007), "Editorial", Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 25 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/mip.2007.02025baa.001

Editorial

The Viewpoint in this issue makes explicit reference to its predecessor in issue number 1 of the current volume. It does so as a rejoinder, not a rebuttal. As Gerard Hastings says, “Saren is absolutely right to decry our reluctance to move beyond the market place”. Indeed, that previous Viewpoint urged us to rewrite the rule books in recognition of the radical change in consumption behaviour since the past decades that the standard textbooks seem still to inhabit, or at least to hanker after. Its author, member of the UK's Group of Six radical marketing academics, cited the case in point of marketing people plying their trade in the pursuit of the common good.

Here, Hastings argues that “the times they are a-changing” (thereby revealing himself to be almost as old as your Editor), and proselytises vigorously on behalf of that “social marketing” discipline. As an advisor to the World Health Organisation who is regularly asked by the Scottish, UK and European Parliaments to contribute to enquiries into the tobacco and food industries, he is unquestionably a world-class figure in the field.

The idea that marketing principle can be transferred to the societal setting has been familiar for almost half a century now, the topic has figured somewhere at least in every typical marketing degree syllabus, and relevant case histories pepper the textbooks. Hastings himself has, since 1980, headed research centres at two UK universities, concerning themselves exclusively with the gathering of market intelligence, the planning of marketing strategies and the evaluation of marketing campaigns, always in pursuit of societal objectives. There are equivalents beyond the UK: for example, the authors of a paper on an unrelated topic in issue number 1 of this volume are both members of a Centre for Applied Social Marketing Research at a university in Australia.

In this Viewpoint, the power (the author's word) that social marketing has to precipitate beneficial change in private and social consumption, is located it in a broader conceptual frame of reference, as defined by Saren. “Critical marketing” is a complex of “radical philosophies and theories ... ideologies and assumptions ... and the wider context of socio-economic relations within which those activities labelled as `marketing' occur”. Hastings argues that, within that framework, social marketing is “demonstrating that the badlands beyond the high street are nothing of the kind. Our skills and ideas are welcome there ... we have something to offer that is greatly valued ... We can help solve two of society's most pressing problems: how to encourage socially desirable behaviour in both the civil and business sectors.”

There are clearly research opportunities in both Viewpoints. Equally important, I believe, are the implications for how we inculcate the critical marketing and social marketing perspectives in the mindsets of those who will be gatherers and users of marketing intelligence in the next generation, via degree curricula, in-service training initiatives, and continuous professional development programmes.

I began this editorial by pointing out that this Viewpoint might have been a right-to-reply, if it had been more contradictory than supportive That is an option we are happy, even keen, to offer to any reader. So far, we have received only one. I hereby invite you to take the initiative if you have been shaken or stirred by any of the ten viewpoints we have published so far, by any of my opinionated editorials, or indeed by anything else that has appeared in Marketing Intelligence & Planning at any time. Send your point of view directly to me at: keithc@strath.ac.uk

Our next contribution maintains the spirit of “critical marketing” in that it originates in a business discipline normally well separated from ours, in universities and in business. Tony Wall is from the School of Accountancy at the University of Ulster in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His topic places him firmly in the Hastings camp, and I welcome his particular perspective on social marketing.

The focus is on “de-marketing” initiatives by the UK Government and its devolved administrations, with respect to three forms of socially harmful consumption behaviour: smoking, excessive drinking and irresponsible use of the private car. The paper provides synopses of background and campaigns that will, if you are reading it elsewhere in the world, provide intriguing glimpses into British politics and society. For instance, less than 10 per cent of the UK population has already joined Ireland, Italy, New Zealand and others in banning smoking in public places, while the rest of the “United” Kingdom lags. (It is Scotland, of course.) Another example is the sadly predictable fact that, in the absence of an official definition of “binge drinking” British consumers of the brewers' and distillers' huge output think of it as, in effect, “drinking more than I do”. Wall's paper includes the findings of a survey of his own students, methodologically entirely defensible since they are the target market for the de-marketing initiatives, whose future behaviour on all three fronts will be crucial to the medical and ecological health of the nation. Gerard Hastings would not be surprised, I think, that the effectiveness of this social de-marketing has been patchy at best (as distinct from the legislation relating to smoking). The important thing is, however, that the effort is being made; it is the planning and execution that demand more “critical” thinking.

Also beyond the present marketing management mainstream is the strategy described in a case study by Jennifer Rowley, Beata Kupiec-Teahan and their ex-student at the University of Wales, Edward Leeming. Using kites for sport rather than recreation is an activity with a definite technological mystique and participant subculture, recalling to mind mountain-biking in the early days of Gary Fisher and Keith Bontrager (or supply your own analogy). It was therefore a well chosen vehicle for an exploration of one small local manufacturer's plan to foster a sense in the target market of “co-creation” of the consumption experience, build and maintain a “customer community” facilitate two-way communication within that community, monitor feedback, and continuously innovate in the pursuit of “customer community leadership”. This is relationship marketing writ large: marketing intelligence, plus knowledge management, plus responsiveness, plus enthusiasm, plus atmospherics (behavioural, not meteorological). The case history describes the planning and control that have allowed the company to attain and maintain leadership at the international level.

Michael Valos and David Bednall of Deakin University in Australia, with Bill Callaghan, Managing Director of Strategic Mapping, also in Melbourne, report their investigation of the influence that a company's strategic posture, as defined by the Porter typology, has on its approach to marketing research, with particular reference to customer relationship management. From among the many interpretations of CRM to be found in the literature, they happen to choose one which is close in spirit to “customer community” concept of the previous paper.

A literature review and preliminary depth interviews fed into the design of a questionnaire administered to senior marketing managers. Analysis of variance in the 240 data sets collected found significant differences only in four uses of market research: to enhance strategic decisions, to extend usability of data, to enhance presentations to management, and for reasons of internal politics. The last of those is undoubtedly interesting, but perhaps not unduly surprising to anyone who has been involved at the sharp end in commissioning research and presenting the findings. The authors note that Porter's “marketing differentiators” in the sample were much higher users of what they regard as “traditional” market research methods. They speculate that the reason may be a tendency to compete on relatively “soft” product attributes, as distinct from functionality, price and the like.

If you should be following up the references in detail, note that the paper by Ganeshasundaram and Henley cited here is not the one on the same topic by the same authors, which you might have noticed in issue number one of this volume of Marketing Intelligence & Planning. That would not have been available to them at the time of writing, of course.

Next, four authors who have managed to forge a research community across continents and cultures. Leyland Pitt of the Segal Graduate School of Business at Simon Fraser University in Canada is joined by two authors across a continent and an ocean at Luleå University of Technology, at the Head of the Gulf of Bothnia in Swedish Lapland. Esmail Salehi-Sangari, is Chairman of the Division of Industrial Marketing and e-Commerce there, by Jean-Paul Berthon is a doctoral researcher. To complete the quartet, we have to cross the equator to find Deon Nel in the Department of Marketing at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

You might already associate the names Pitt and Berthon (though Pierre rather than Jean-Paul) with the ICON matrix and measuring scale. They can be used to classify firms into one of four “archetypes” describing their “mode of strategic focus”. If you recognise Icon Matrix as one of a brand line of plastic water bottles for sports applications (perhaps including kiting) you can join me in my previous lamentable ignorance of a widely reviewed diagnostic tool. In this study, an appropriately modified version of the multi-item ICON questionnaire was administered to a sample of marketing managers in South Africa, a research location chosen because the country exhibits more of the characteristics of a “turbulent” business environment than the more familiar settings of Europe and North America.

The 258 respondents recorded their own perceptions of the degree of turbulence their companies had to contend with before answering the questions that allowed the researchers to assign them to one of the four archetypes; analysis of variance led to the conclusion that the latter significantly affected the former. It also suggested that different archetypes performed significantly differently with respect to important dimensions of performance: profit, market share and growth. The authors assert that this is evidence for the practical value of using the ICON diagnosis as the basis for a deliberate strategic prognosis, instead of leaving it to chance which archetype results from planning inertia. More radically, they speculate that it may be “time to question the wisdom of blindly following the familiar and simplistic mantra: give customer what they want”. There are times for following and times for leading, for reacting and for innovating, for listening and for turning a deaf ear. Discuss, using examples from your own experience.

Brazil could be characterised as a turbulent operating environment. It is also one of those “second world” countries to which, as regular readers will know, I believe we should pay much more attention and from which we can learn much more useful lessons than from another American case study or another angst-ridden analysis of the threat from China. You may be reading this in one such country yourself. I was therefore pleased that Marcos Fava Neves of the University of São Paulo persevered so commendably in the face of the challenge of explaining his work in detail in a foreign language. The communication strategy of allocating roughly half the total explanation to tables and figures, and concentrating on commentary and conclusions in the main text, was unusual and original. I leave it to you to decide how successful it has been, but I do not doubt that you will easily follow his exposition.

The construction of a marketing plan is of course a familiar ingredient of English-language textbooks. What Neves has done is to meld the best-known examples, organise the ingredients in his own way, and then add an extra dimension. His template requires manages to consider how each phase of the plan might be affected, for better or for worse but potentially for the better, by explicitly considering the wider networks to which individual firms belong, whether deliberately or by accident. The conventional models certainly do not yet do that explicitly. The planners may do so spontaneously, but there is much to be said for persuading all the actors in the system to play together.

Perhaps, the outcome of adding the incentive explicitly seems to you to result in an unduly complex document, a potentially confusing overlay on a proposal for a structured plan that would be valid anyway, more likely to deter planners in practice than to motivate them? That might be a first-world point of view. There again, is it idealistic to expect such ready collaboration, even with competitors, in our Westernised marketing world? Well, teamwork is effective in other contexts, and I recall that professional and trade associations were pretty strong in the intensely competitive advertising business. Could it be that the Neves panning model takes account of that “critical marketing” that the Saren and Hastings Viewpoints challenge us to recognise?

Keith Crosier