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Koplyay T., Lloyd D., Jazouli A., Mitchell B. Vol.12 No
THE STRATEGIC MARKETING FUNCTION IN DYNAMIC
MARKETS
**Koplyay T., Lloyd D., Jazouli A., Mitchell B. ***
Abstract: Marketing has a glamorous role in the business world. It is at the forefront of the firm-market interaction, it represents the best compensated activity in an organization. Marketing assumes a leadership role in the firm and sets the tone of the strategic plans. The approach and strategies seen in marketing throughout the market lifecycle are influenced by factors and players, which significantly curtail its role and circumscribe its influence. This article examines the evolution, along the market lifecycle, of marketing’s role and spheres of influence, and proposes two predictive mechanisms that allow for the estimation of “tipping points” for the different characteristics that define the marketing profile along the lifecycle. We introduce the big bang model of market dynamics and examine the behavior of the marketing function depending where the firm is relative to sink holes, transient and steady states and how the market is pulsing defines the marketing priorities. The article further identifies the factors circumscribing the functions and freedoms of marketing along the lifecycle in hi-tech, to develop a clear picture of the various roles that marketing plays as the firm proceeds along the lifecycle from incubation to market maturity.
Key words: marketing function evolution, marketing tipping points, lifecycle model, big bang model, market dynamics
Introduction
Marketing does not operate in a vacuum; rather it takes its cues from one of the primary functions of a firm – strategy. Strategy as it evolves along the market lifecycle will send different “coding instructions” into the marketing function. To better understand the main constraints and opportunity sets for marketing activities, we observe the changing profile of a firm’s strategy and how it responds to major anchoring events in the market as the firm proceeds from start up through incubation, to high growth to levelling off, and through the dark phase of shakeout to market maturity and eventual decline. Our template will focus on the hi-tech sector, but generally any market that experiences rapid changes will fit the model.
The Market Landscape; the Lifecycle Approach
From the perspective of the lifecycle model the young firm starts out in the primordial market darkness looking for its universe to be born. This is the incubation stage prior to the market even signalling its existence; entrepreneurs abound, and new ideas float, often aimlessly. Various product offerings are put forth to test market appeal until some combination triggers the interest of the early
- (^) Prof. Tamas Koplyay, Université du Québec en Outaouais , Doug Lloyd, Abdelkader
Jazouli, Brian Mitchell, Szent Istvan University corresponding author: dlloyd@cambrian.ca
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market customer base, known in the hi-tech universe as the technology enthusiasts, or early-adopters. These technology motivated customers are attracted to inherently cutting edge products and actively seek them out, but they represent only a very small percentage of the total market. However, they are a necessary and sufficient mass to confirm the firm’s market acceptance and to push the incubating firm towards the take off point for exponential growth ( Inside the tornado , Moore). Figure 1 provides the overview of the succession of the customer groups during the market lifecycle along with market periods where behavior shifts due to different emerging dynamics and risk profiles.
Bowling Alley
Tornado Tombstone
Shakeout
Mainstreet
Technology Enthusiasts Visionaries^
Pragmatists (^) Conservatives Skeptics
Market Dynamics and Customer Base
Chasm Early market
Figure 1. Market evolution and the customer base
Eventually the pragmatists (the early majority) become aware of the product through the endorsement of the visionaries and enthusiasts. The early majority will buy once they are convinced that the product is complete and offers value for money. Pragmatists look for higher quality and more rigorous QA in the product development. Early adopters do not care about quality, they are motivated by the “newness” of the product, and the fact that they can be ahead of the rest of the population. The bridge to the pragmatists is the bowling alley phase where vertical marketing dominates and successive market segments are conquered through a common linkage effect. When the market explodes beyond the bowling alley with the “Tornado” period of exponential growth ensues dragging the firm and its competitors through a phase where vertical marketing transforms to horizontal and the mass market materializes (Moore, 1999). As the tornado churns, it heads towards a critical market transition point called the shakeout, which materializes once the exponential growth is exhausted and a levelling-off stage is reached as now the number of firms in the
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The Market Dynamics of the Big Bang Model
Although the market lifecycle and Moore’s model (Moore, 1999) elucidates the overall market roadmap, there are different ways to examine the life-cycle: The lifecycle approach that traces the evolution of both the market and the firms and can be used to map most of the critical firm functions such as finance, innovation HR (Koplyay et al., 2014; O’Grady et al., 2000). The second is centered on tracing the effects of strategy choices that creates a force field, again mapable along the lifecycle but more importantly inducing a flux that seems to attract the group of firms towards a market black hole or point of no return (Paquin and Koplyay, 2006). And a third technique, the big bang model, which parses the market along the lifecycle into transient and steady states. At the heart of the transient states are the sink holes, of various colors ranging from white holes (which spews new firms into market), to various progressively darkening grey holes which swallow up firms commensurately with the intensity of the greyness, and finally a black hole at the end of market lifecycle; Market Exit, which irreversibly engulfs all the remaining firms. (The principal author of this article was involved in developing these approaches and now hopes to apply their most telling attributes to the understanding of the development of the marketing function within the lifecycle and big bang models) The common theme emerging from the three models is that the market appears to have a life of its own and the presence of firms in the market creates a dynamic force that subjects the firms to a long term predictable fate as it pushes them along the market lifecycle. Firms can resist and counter the force but, by and large, certain dynamic conditions preordain outcomes that are more attributable to prevailing market conditions than the individual strategies of the firms. For instance, although planning and pre-emptive strategic behavior usually pays off for diligent firms, sometimes planning is not only futile but counterproductive, such as during the firm’s transit through the shakeout phase. We shall look at the third approach and it’s the general model concepts little bit closer now. The big bang model is a different way of looking at the lifecycle by parsing the cycle into transient and steady states, where the transients produce “sink holes” that progressively swallow more firm mass as the firms transit their zones. We will discuss in the next section the coloring of sink holes in the market, which range from white, to shades of gray, and finally to black. The model is named big bang for the exponential growth phase of the market that follows the bowling alley. The big bang lights up the market and soon new competitors are rushing in to take advantage of the high growth and high margins situation. During the early big bang period, the market is growing too fast for any firm to follow, so some deliberate choices are made to focus on sub-sections of the market through a strategy called the bowling alley, which really is just a linked niche markets approach (Moore,
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1999), and then knocking over the pins of the alley to get swept up by the tornado transforms vertical to horizontal marketing and later mass marketing in maturity. A good example of linked niche markets was Entrust in the internet security (encryption) market. By choosing the banks as their central pin, the bowling alley naturally materialized through the banks’ ecosystem and the banks’ approval became the strongest recommendation for future adoption by other users: “good enough for the banks, good enough for us” was the mantra, assuming of course that the banks did their due diligence of the security features. Examining the “sink-holes” first, the white hole which occurs during early market phase and serves as an entry point of new firms which either see opportunities in start up, bowling alley, or especially the tornado with its high growth and growth- rich margins potential. The effects of the white hole are felt during the entire first half of the market until shakeout occurs. The chasm-related grey hole occurs because some firms cannot make the transition from dazzling technology to more cautious “made to measure” niche based offerings. This is a phase where marketing begins to play a serious role by curtailing the hitherto untrammeled freedoms of product developers in the young firm.
Figure 3. The big bang market model
To cross the chasm, channels need to be built and filled for profit maximizing effect, so the engineering challenge of making the product cutting edge is replaced by the marketing one of how to make the product more appealing to customers who lack the technological sophistication but wish to keep up with advances.
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is a period of strategic and marketing drift, but if it looks like you will reach safe haven then some of your accumulated financial assets (stock price, cash, and lines of credit) can be used to acquire struggling firms with great technology, presaging the big consolidation phase just over the horizon. Most firms don’t emerge from shakeout and what’s left for maturity configures mostly as a loose oligopoly. Market maturity heads towards inexorable price taker situation that demands higher market share and better internal cost focussed execution to achieve margins. The firm now concentrates on achieving economies of scale and scope and this demands better market share for scale and tighter relationship with platform members for scope. Hence a period of intense M &A activity ensues that reduces the market competitor universe to an oligopoly, and if the market has steep economies of scale, it can lead to monopoly. The consolidation grey hole decimates the number of firms in the market, not as substantially as in shakeout but more significantly in terms of scale. It’s the destroyers that disappear in the shakeout, but it’s the battleships and carriers that go under in the consolidation grey hole. So the mass of the firms dragged under by M&A can be much bigger than the total mass of firms in shakeout, although the number of firms lost in shakeout is much higher. Finally, at market exit the remnants of the firms are crunched into oblivion. Throughout these successive sink holes and in between, in the steady states, different marketing considerations dominate. What about the steady states? There are marketing considerations accompanying each transition point from transient to steady states, and conversely. What distinguishes steady from transient states is the fact that market drivers for transients are stochastic, or unpredictable and so internal dynamics are only partially understood, but nevertheless outcomes for the general firm population are documented; some will perish, some will survive depending how the mechanism of the hole unfolds; the driving force in consolidation being the M&A activity and for standard setting the emergence of the technology platform. In steady state the market driving force is orderly and firms can plan, navigate and achieve results depending on how resources are deployed. We have already alluded to the interface between one transient and steady state, the chasm/bowling alley coupling. The marketing challenge is to find the right niche(s) and pursue vertical marketing by knocking over linked pins in the bowling alley. A central pin maybe Samsung and the other pins firms dealing directly with Samsung, or Boeing and its value chain. A steady/steady state interface, which happens only once in the lifecycle, at the bowling alley to tornado transition requires a major shift from vertical to horizontal marketing. Whereas in vertical marketing the customer is king in the tornado it’s just a pawn in the way during later stages (Moore, 1999 inside tornado). In early tornado steady state the standard setting transient intrudes as soon as some firms have accumulated enough market share to exert pressure on other firms to adopt their technology going forward. The horizontal marketing approach gets modified by the platform discipline of creating compatible and seamless technology interfaces between the standard and its third party suppliers
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ecosystem, such as suppliers of iPhone software to Apple. As the platform transient is exhausted, a new interface emerges with a now weakening tornado that leaves behind its explosive growth phase and offers a still growing but fading rate that offers the first glimpse of the coming overcrowding of competitors and the unavoidable shakeout. The marketing function does another pirouette and goes from aggressive market share capture to the first phase of market share defense and market survival mode as the shakeout represents a very red ocean market (Chan and Mauborgne, 2005) where all competitors try to enter the same lifeboat. A strong, stable and defensible market share in the shakeout is a prerequisite for survival but no guarantee. Finally, when the tornado and the shakeout are left behind and market skies clear and first signs of maturity emerge, due to price taking pressures the consolidation transient ensues. From the shakeout transient, the most violent of the sink holes, to market maturity the role of marketing hardly changes expect for the fact that due diligence on market share defense is paramount. The market share game is now zero sum and everyone needs the share for the same purpose; executing on economies of scale/scope strategies. As soon as this realization sinks in, the consolidation frenzy begins, and now marketing plays a key role driving the M&A exercise; who to target and why. After the acquisition, realizing the market gain synergies and eliminating the overlaps, often resulting in sales force downsizing. Market maturity may last a long time, many times longer than the big bang period and during this period a modus vivendi is developed among the few dominant players left in the market. There could be one or two imposing ones which rely on branding to create and hold the marketing high ground against lesser players as was the case with Intel in the semiconductor market. The marketing strategy remains stable, reinforcing and defending the brand which is a lot less costly than attacking it. Branding leads to strong margins through charging a brand premium and through higher market share executing better against the economies of scale leading to lower costs. Higher price and lower costs are excellent competitive advantages in mature markets where innovation based competition has been banished to niche markets and disruptive technologies curtailed, but not eliminated, during the platform transient. A perfect example is IT in government, where often several generations of technology coexist under the same roof. In the Canadian government it is not unusual to see 40 years’ worth of technology overlap, and see a mix of modern, leading edge, and legacy systems and infrastructure all co- existing, but expensive to manage, interface, and maintain. But if you are a firm supporting such legacy technology, a decent living can be made, as is demonstrated by the continuing operations of Lucent within the Alcatel-Lucent group. Lucent provides services to legacy systems on almost a monopoly basis and as long as the installed IT base remains relatively large, the profit prospects for Lucent remain strong (IBM was the service provider for Lotus suite within the Canadian government departments till recent years).
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This evolving value scenario impacts marketing. MVA is mostly a marketing responsibility to the extent that total growth, market share and strength define share price especially during the early market development. Later, as EVA becomes important, this result is attained by better production and logistics management such lean Management Heijunka (Przemyslaw et al., 2014), and even though marketing is still there, it does not play a central role. Strategy defines the firm’s DNA, in that the coding instructions from strategy are used by the various functions to gauge their own plans and modes of operation. This in particular is true of marketing, which tends to track strategy closely and is often at the core of the strategic choice, because it is so focused on the market. We must never fail to observe, however, that in the early stages of a firm’s life the marketing shapes strategy, and later stages strategy constrains marketing. They are both referential to each other as functions. When they get out of alignment, usually near a transient a tipping point is reached, and the black hole looms large.
Time
Introduction Phase Growth Phase (^) Maturity Phase (^) Decline Phase
Innovators
Early Adopters
Early Majority
Late Majority
Laggards
Strategicbandwidth
Product Focus Product Differentiation
Niche Cost Leadership
Figure 4. The Flow of Strategic Choices in the Market Life Cycle
In above model the customer profiles evolve from innovators to enthusiast/ visionaries, early majority to pragmatists, late majority to conservatives and laggards to skeptics, and the marketing function has to evolve along with the market realities and opportunities. As the firm starts out, the strategy is product development which is an innovation function. Leading technologies, blue sky big thinking and bold innovation, bordering on bleeding edge, are the guiding principles. As earlier argued, this is done to catch the attention of the early market. The next phase is product differentiation right into the bowling alley and channel exploitation a purely marketing function. Distribution channels are investments
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and so are focusing on specific customer groups within the pragmatist segment. So both finance and, soon thereafter, production begin to assume roles, and constraints are levied on marketing in the same fashion that marketing circumscribed product development once the chasm appeared. Finance needs returns on investments so a priority is assigned to maximum utilization of channels, and marketing loses some freedoms to add pins to the bowling alley. Furthermore - and this fact is almost always overlooked - given that the pragmatists are driven by the price/quality/reliability factors, production considerations enter the scene to guarantee better prices, increased quality and reliability, production starts to signal its needs for better designed products that are cheaper to manufacture, have fewer moving parts for increased reliability, and incorporate tested components for quality. Production’s increasing role usually is confirmed by a technique called concurrent engineering, where product development, marketing and production jointly develop the next generation products. With production’s role on the rise, marketing is losing some powers and product development is fading. Once this task is accomplished, the key is to follow the market growth the best way possible in order to build market share right into the tornado. Transition for vertical marketing inside the bowling alley to horizontal marketing aiming for mass markets is the hallmarks of tornado take off. Share price for start-up companies correlates well with top line growth, specifically market share growth, and premium is paid for firms that manage to build market strength; that is market share that dominates the competition’s share. This is money in the bank as firms with good market strength can eventually practice branding, and within hi-tech, create technology standards either alone or in coalition with other companies. Standards-setting is often sold under the appealing rubric of benefiting the customer base by developing stable technology platforms, when in fact it just carves the market status quo into stone by conferring an enormous advantage to those competitors who build the platform. The bottom line is that standards setting banishes breakthrough innovation from the market and allows only those advances that fit the platform on the edges. Under this scenario, product developers have a brief resurrection of influence at the expense of marketing. Production also benefits because standards encourage uniformity of production methods and processes which aid in the goals of this function to meet the pragmatists’ needs. Some examples can be cited:
- The duopoly Intel/Microsoft (Wintel) that controls operating systems for PCs, Windows, and
- The battle back in the eighties for supremacy of the video tape. Sony had the superior technology in Beta but lacked the coalition partners to impose the standard, and VHS prevailed because it had a stronger backing in the industry. Sony learned from this mistake and prevailed in the more recent DVD standards battle with Blu-Ray.
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almost always posts higher margins and profits than the competition, and because of these higher margins it is more immune to market volume fluctuations than the competition, say AMD or Via Technologies, which must compensate for lower margins with higher volumes. But this leads to an impasse as in late markets all the growth has been exhausted and the customer recruiting costs become prohibitive as every competitor needs the market share for the same reason: to lower costs (Sanchez et al., 2011). Niche markets have higher margins which are maintained in hi-tech through intense innovation or intense expertise, and if successfully defended from incursions by the mass market players, the opportunity exists to eventually expand back into the main market, as was done by Apple with its line-up of “i” products (iPad, iPhone, etc.). A well planned move to niche market can make the mass market refugee into a localized monopoly player with all the perks and privileges. Once you retreat to a niche market you may lose the core competencies to re- emerge as a mass market player; your culture is innovation focused and not cost oriented, as required in the mass market. Other things being equal, the niche market player relies more on marketing skills than the mass market one to maintain the already attractive margins.
No competition Increasing stable^ Equilibrium stable Market Share Importance
Low barriers High barriers (competence) (assets, size, relations)
Basis of Competitive Strength Core Competencies Core Capabilities Client Relations Client base unstable Client base stable Client base unstable Competitor Pressure Low Maximum Decreasing
Speed Span Structure Scope Scale Sales Structure Sales Strategy Strength Synergy
Increasing unstable
Decreasing unstable
Figure 5. The opportunity and constraints experienced by marketing as a result of the firm’s competitive landscape during the market lifecycle
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The mass market player, on the other hand, will rely more on the production and logistics functions to bring down costs and open margins. So a retreat to niche markets is affirmation of marketing’s relatively important role, but not as important as the role of innovation, as practiced by the product developers. One strong defensive capability in the niche market is patented intellectual property (IP) that automatically excludes competition from entering. In the U.S., courts tend to favor IP over free competition, hence adding weight to the defensibility argument once the niche market is established and ringed by IP (Supple et al, 2005). Marketing and strategy are, most of the time, so closely related that they can be considered to be the same variable or at least very strongly correlated. Risk taking, as the market develops (Koplyay et al, 2015), is progressively washed out of the firm and more cautious, deliberate, well-rehearsed and long term plans supplement the early risk prone, spontaneous and creative approaches (and much of marketing is the result of creative ideas). As risk aversion mounts at the top, marketing falls in line and its plans start to align with the cautious approach of the other functions, and hence scope for independent marketing thought or action is progressively diminished. But a new, hitherto unknown marketing activity may arise in maturity: selling the firm’s values and initiatives to its stakeholder community. As the firm grows, its stakeholder maps get a lot more complex with most of the stakeholders outside the firm (especially when facing economic downturns), and this has to be properly managed internally and externally to achieve long term goals (Sanchez et al., 2011; Olszewska and Piwoni-Krzeszowska, 2014); here marketing gets a reprieve with a new role such social marketing (Bajdor and Brzeziński , 2013) to indulge in selling the reputation of the firm (goodwill) to the public at large, and the stakeholders to obtain a critical mass of support for the pending action. Some recent examples are: 1) under a disaster scenario, BP and the gulf spill; 2) the oil sands consortium promoting the keystone pipeline to provide Canadian oil for U.S. refineries; and 3) in the past, the redemption marketing effort by Intel, after the introduction of a faulty chip, to regain market confidence: much of the success of this campaign was due to Intel’s position as the leading and crushingly dominant brand in its market.
The Tyranny of the Cost Curves
Costs such the optimization of the global cost of the product's life cycle (Man et al.,
- are the mirror images of margins and are always key to formulation of both strategy and marketing policies. Two particular costs play key roles in hi-tech: customer retention and customer acquisition costs. The key factor to remember about costs is the relative levels of retention and acquisition costs that determine marketing approaches and not the combined effect of the two, and that the transition from offensive to defensive marketing is rather sudden (the crossover point between the two curves). We should note that the total
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tandem progression of good fortunes - or not. So the B2C scenario represents the development of serious co-dependence and one of the emerging roles for marketing on supplier premises must be the divining of key customers’ long term market prospects. This means that business intelligence feeds the marketing function as much as it does strategy, and often marketing may supplant strategy in stagnant mature markets as the firm supplier finds itself in the grips of a developing value chain that imposes its own strategic discipline on it. If the circumstances are more like B2c and no customer dictates its supplier’s future, then the marketing role is not as pronounced. Conversely, if it’s a b2C situation and the supplying firm is facing a monopsony constraint (consultants serving government IT as an example) then both strategy and marketing are faced with survival options. If one single contract is terminated, the customer of the supplying firm may fail.
Conclusions
The various indicators of hi-tech firm development all seem to point in the same direction as far as the changing roles of marketing are concerned during the market lifecycle. The different arguments which have sundry starting points all lead to consistent conclusions about what, how and when marketing is performing certain activities and why. The model appears to have both explanatory and predictive capacities that can triangulate the future and past (because the arguments are symmetric in time) of marketing during market development. The model even accounts for the exceptional circumstances in mostly mature markets that guide the rise and fall of marketing, depending whether business or consumer marketing is involved and the relative size of customers compared to the supplier. In the early phases of a firm’s growth, we see that marketing and strategy have a mutual and interdependent relationship where each provides key input to the other’s function. The relationship changes through the black hole, and bowling alley, until the functions are distinct, and loosely coupled at maturity. Furthermore, the internal combination of factors such as the relative lengths of product development cycles and product shelf life can also be highlighted within the model. Further research can confirm whether the same ideas can be applied to other market sectors and to what extent the conclusions reached in this paper are transferable to more general market conditions.
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