ABSTRACT
This chapter clarifi es what we mean by marketing as strategy. We then emphasize the difference in “strategic thinking”, as opposed to focusing on operations and tactics. This is important because it is often diffi cult for managers to separate themselves from day-to-day operations – physically or mentally – yet this is vital. I suggest that not only are the issues different, the perspective should be, too – that is to say that the challenge is also “thinking strategically”. It is not enough to recognize that some issues have strategic signifi cance – it is also important to address them in a different way. Then we can move on to the building blocks for creating a valuebased strategy. This chapter is built around the logic that value drives effective strategy. Even then, we have a problem – customer value is not the straightforward idea it may seem and teasing out what drives superior value for different groups of customers is a major challenge. It is also one of the most important challenges to face up to. If you can get a company to really take customer value seriously, instead of just paying lip service to it, you have probably just made a major contribution to enhancing business performance. The structure of this chapter is summarized in Figure 5.1.
