Post by account_disabled on Feb 17, 2024 6:38:54 GMT -5
Note that these are two players: the company and the competition. Customers are largely a passive player in this world. They purchase the product mainly from the supplier who enjoys the lowest cost position and therefore can be sharpest on the price. As a result of this evolution, when I began my career working with companies on strategy in 1981, I viewed marketing as a discipline primarily concerned with the interaction between companies and customers versus strategy which was concerned with the interaction between companies and competitors.
Of course, competitors were not 100% absent for the marketing discipline. The product and pricing aspects of the 4Ps had to be considered against the competition. But when I worked with marketers, I typically had Mobile Phone Number to push them pretty hard to consider how competitors would react to their potential 4P choices. Likewise, customers were not 100% absent for the strategy. Someone was buying those products influenced by the learning curve. Yet I always wondered why strategists didn't pay more attention to customer behavior. For each discipline, the dominant players in the business: companies for both disciplines plus customers for one, multiple competitors for the other.
But over time, both disciplines have recognized the need to integrate the third actor more centrally into their work. Michael Porter provided a push to include the customer more centrally in strategy with his introduction of differentiation as a generic strategy. For that strategy, a company needed to deeply understand customers to provide them with unique value. Next, design elements, including deep ethnographic understanding of users and rapid, iterative prototyping with them, were incorporated into the strategy . At the same time, marketers increasingly recognized that the role of competitors needed to be more fully integrated into their discipline.