ABSTRACT
Marketing executives in the twenty-first century face complex and turbulent markets, with ever-more demanding and sophisticated customers, new types of competition emerging from multiple sources, multiple channels reflecting the impact of Internet marketing, new technologies impacting on product obsolescence, urgent globalization imperatives, and radical shifts in the type of buyer-seller relationships required to deliver value to the customer. While developing and planning effective and innovative marketing strategies to prosper in these fiercely competitive conditions is a major challenge, it remains unavoidably true that the capability to execute strategies effectively is a critical requirement. Now more than ever before, the successful companies are those who get things done to deliver superior value to customers. For example, Dell Computers is widely admired for its direct business model and sophisticated Internet marketing. One of Dell’s hidden capabilities is rapid and effective response to customer needs – when
the US military complex at the Pentagon was attacked by terrorists on 11 September 2001, many computers and servers were damaged, yet Dell had replaced all damaged equipment at the Pentagon within 48 hours of the loss. The most central point to be made in this chapter is that one of the most significant challenges for marketing is implementation, but also, by implication, the organizational changes that are required to achieve the effective implementation of marketing strategies and programmes.
