Question:

One of the themes we discussed in class this term has focused on the marketing strategy of the firm; its interplay with corporate and business strategy; the creation of competitive advantage and its use by the firm to achieve a superior and sustained perceived value proposition; and how all these interfaces lead to improved strategy performance.Question # 1: One of the themes we discussed in class this term has focused on the marketingstrategy of the firm; its interplay with corporate and business strategy; the creation of competitive advantage and its use by the firm to achieve a superior and sustained perceived value proposition; and how all these interfaces lead to improved strategy performance.

In light of our class discussion, case analyses, and your readings on these topics, discuss

(a) the principal managerial issues involved in marketing strategy formulation, highlighting both intra- and inter-organizational phenomena involved in this process and the six questions we underscored in class on this topic (what is the overarching strategy, what markets to enter and why so, etc)

(b) how the firm will integrate its corporate, SBU, and marketing strategies, and how it will link its marketing strategy performance with business strategy performance and financial strategy performance and

(c) how the firm will manage the sometimes conflicting tradeoffs involving marginal costs vs marginal benefits associated with preferring one strategy position vs another (such as cost leadership vs differentiation vs focus strategy)

Incorporate into your answer the roles that psychological, sociological, anthropological, and socio-psychological ingredients play in creating and sustaining a superior perceived value proposition and how the firm may compete in multiple markets

[Hint: in answering this question, you will need to draw from the Varadarajan 2010, Varadarajan and Jayachandran 1999, Morgan 2012, Varadarajan and Clark 1994, and the Jayachandran, Gimeno, and Varadarajan 1999 readings and our class discussions on these issues]

Question # 2: Another theme we discussed in class this term focused on the capabilities of market-driven (MD) organizations and how these enhance the firm's marketing strategy. In this context, we highlighted the roles of market orientation (MO), organizational learning (OL), the learning organization (LO), absorptive capacity (AC) and dynamic capabilities (DC) in enhancing the firm's positional advantage (PA) and through PA, its firm performance (FP). In light of our class discussion, case analyses, and your readings on these topics, discuss

(a) what, in your view, is a MD organization (what capabilities it will possess and how it will operationalize these to achieve superior FP), highlighting the role of market learning (market information processing) in organizational learning

(b) how MO can be a source of sustainable competitive advantage (CA), highlighting the 3 MO conceptualizations we discussed in class (the market intelligence view, the corporate culture view, and the organizational learning view) and how these might, along with AC, enhance OL and lead to superior FP and

(c) how marketing managers might link marketing strategy performance to shareholder value