QUESTION
Part 3 – Major individual research essay (30%)
2000 word essay (plus or minus 10%)
Due via AssignIT at 1600 on Friday 14/10/11
Explain why, in business and marketing planning, it is necessary to find a balance between the planned and emergent approaches to strategy; and compare the effectiveness of game theory (as proposed by Nalebuff and Brandenburger) and driving markets (as proposed by Jaworski et alia) in assisting marketers to find that balance.
Present your discussion in an essay format. In your discussion be sure to address the assessment criteria listed on the feedback sheet for this assignment.
Your essay will be marked in terms of
Your understanding of the two approaches to strategy and the various strategic concepts and frameworks discussed in the course
Evidence of reading and research wider than the course readings and lectures.
Clarity of expression and evidence of marketing thinking.
The structure and logic of your argument.
Relevant practical examples and your own observations and opinions
Logical planning and sequence of the essay
Overall presentation, including correct grammar, spelling and punctuation (although allowances will be made for students from non-English-speaking backgrounds)
The purpose of this assignment is to examine your ability to break down an issue, critically analyse its component parts, formulate an original opinion, and support it with logical argument, based on the evidence that you have personally discovered or observed. This assignment also examines your ability to demonstrate what you have learned from this course in a broad sense by applying your mind to the literature, reflecting upon it and defining your own approach to business and marketing planning.
The formatting and layout of this assignment must comply with the criteria listed under “Submission and return of assignments”, otherwise up to 10 marks will be deducted.
Feedback on this assignment will be provided on BMPP Assignment feedback 2.0, a copy of which must be downloaded from the course web site and attached at the back of your assignment.
SOLUTION
In today’s fast growing business environment gaining a competitive edge is necessary and that is why the business organizations require formulating and implementing new strategies time to time to beat the heat of competition. In such cases to gain competitive edge on your opponent Business marketing panning plays a vital role. The strategies can be formulated in two manners either the Approach can be Planned or Emergent approach (cited in Hill Jones, 2007). Which one is better is slightly tricky question to answer as both have their pros and cons and it entirely depends upon the framework of formulating the strategies used in the operations in the organization.
There are basically two kinds of frameworks in which organizations work:
• Scenario Planning
• Competing on the edge
Scenario Planning
If an organization follows the scenario planning framework it has to follow a perfect combination of both planned as well as emergent approach. In order to formalize the process of scenario planning, planned approach for strategy formulation is required. However, after using the planned approach and reaching the anticipated states the organization will have to implement emergent approach through its management in order to stage and manage the decision variables of the firm.
Competing on the edge
In this kind of framework where the organization is competing on the edge it has to use the emergent approach in order to implement strategic planning, because at this stage the organization is responding to the varying nature of the external environment of the organization. Since in the external world the competition level is very high, any business organization cannot maintain its status quo in the ever changing and highly competitive business environment. It is highly recommended to change according to external environment for the organization to survive tough competition. In the current scenario any business organization has to keep on changing as per the changing environment to face severe competition. Thus a constant changing environment of the organization becomes a part and parcel along with the requirement for survival.
But in order to manage this change and its complexities a company has to hire a change management consultant, who can handle the changes effectively. The complexities in the organization arise in any organization as it has to keep its sharp focus on the strategies along with maintaining its focus on growth too. A clearly and well communicated strategic focus will help in determining the effectiveness and the long term survival of any organization along with competitive edge in the market. This in turn is directly connected with the communication of organizational mission and forethought. Therefore it is quite evident that the organization needs to unite its mission and dreams to formulate effective communicated strategic focus. This will obviously helps in streaming the efforts of the employees to achieve the targeted end state. Thus keeping strategically focused all the end states and managing change becomes vital to use the benefits of change to the fullest.
It is quite evident that we need to maintain the strategic focus and the changing existing structure of any organization. The reason being the change in the external environment is very fast and the effective current strategies will not hold good for long term, till the time the organizational structure is ready to adapt them by managing the change. Thus the planned and the emergent approach plays a major and vital role in scenario as well as competing on the edge frameworks by creating a striking balance between the two evident alternatives available. However, both the approaches have pros and cons attached to them. Like the planned approach helps in formalizing the process while an emergent approach does not do so.
Business planning: Business planning involves strategic drivers and business requirements we want to achieve after identifying the effects and reasons for the business (Business plans and marketing strategy, business balls.com).
Cause is the input or action or the resource that would be used for business planning and the Effect is the consequence or the result or the outcome of the action or the input that we see.
Market Planning: marketing Planning involves exciting methods which enhance the creativity, innovation and enthusiasm in the business. A perfect marketing plan can be prepared using both internal as well as external information. Internal information can be obtained using sales data etc. which is available within the organization and external information’s need to be collected from outside for e.g. the demographic trends (Pophal 2009)
Developing a Marketing or Business plan depends on various factors like:
• Size of organization
• Number of products
• Services offered by the organization
• Number of the target markets
• Size of target market segments.
That is why most firms apply these techniques of marketing planning and business planning to widely understand the market and have a high impact entrance into the market. marketing is the principle mechanism used by firms to give desired outputs as per the customer expectations(McKee et al., 1990).That is why the process of planning is used to develop market oriented products and behaviours in the firm which the managers can use to make the firm grow. There are various approaches which are designed for marketing planning and business planning but here we are going to discuss and compare the two major approaches that are very ideal in form:
1. Planned Approach
2. Emergent Approach
Planned approach: Marketing planning or business planning is considered as a technique which has several activities involved in it. This technique of planning helps in achieving a perfect balance between external as well as internal environments and factors of the organization. Thus helping the organization by attaining a perfect balance between internal outcomes and external environment to achieve the targeted results. The set of methodologies are well defines in case of marketing planning and are consistently prominent in and around all the areas.
In case of planned approach various techniques and tools are being used to measure the planning practices. These cover very elaborate measures which include extent, manner and degree used by any organization to implement these planning activities. This being very linear, rationale, formal, top-down and comprehensive way is also referred to as Synotopic Approach (Frederickson, 1983).
Benefits of using Planned approach in Marketing Planning
Using a planned approach in marketing or business planning helps in decision making. Usually the outcome of all the decision are rationale, comprehensive and objective, which in turn leads a path towards allocating the resources in more beneficial and better manner and thus the organizational efficiency also improves.
Emergent Approach: This is the most recently applicable approach where the planning approach tries to study up to which extent the “good” planning behaviours are being adopted by any organization. After the implementation of these good planning behaviours a relationship between the performance and the implementation of behaviours is analysed very closely. Since very confusing patterns were found in this research a planned approach of finding the relationship using various tools and techniques was used.
Emergent approach or the Adaptive planning is totally reverse of Top-down approach. Here the approach follows bottom up problem solving techniques and approaches. This approach admits that there is presence rather predominant presence of organizational politics in the organization. That is why it has capacity to prove emergent for the organization as it is based on more realistic approach (Mintzberg, 1973).
However we will find that every type of approach be it Planned or Emergent has some strengths and weaknesses in it.
Game Theory by Brandenburger and Nalebuff
In their book called ’Co-opetition’ Brandenburger and Nalebuff tried to develop a set of guidelines to make it simpler and easier to understand the strategies proposed with a reasoning to justify them using game theory. They have chosen games which are for mutual benefit and consider the harm factor too for the players. Co-optition which is formed by combination of cooperation and competition truly justifies itself. Thus the market gets great help from both factors that are cooperation and competition. This game theory suggests a completely new approach towards developing strategies for the marketers to develop the desired balance. Brandenburger and Nalebuff have proposed a new term ‘complementors’ which can be sued by marketing managers for the organizations which sell goods to augment the value of the products sold by other firms For e.g. gas stations collaborate with fast food chains, where they mutually promote each other. They have considered these complementors as the part of stakeholders group along with others (Armstrong & Clark, 1997).
In general the views used or suggested by them in the game theory are very general and help us to think on very clear line of context. They have suggested a framework which is known as PARTS:
• Players (decide who is playing and who should play the game?)
• Adding Values (what new every new player adds to the game?)
• Rules (Know the rules and can these rules be changed?)
• Tactics ( alternative tactics that can be used) and
• Scope (is there any scope for expansion of game?)
Thus by following all these frameworks any organization can easily develop and implement the strategies to create a striking balance. They have devised unique ways of applications which are very insightful and traditional too. Like they have helped in disclosing hidden aspects of problems which usually get unnoticed by marketing managers like they suggested the Frequent flyer program to improve the brand loyalty of American Airlines. Another important thing the marketing managers ignore is that they treat their rival customers with more respect than their own customers. Like giving extra befits to new customers which they win from their rivals in form of better rates or incentive programs, on the other hand ignoring their loyal customers and not giving them such schemes. Thus games theory helps in thinking about alternative strategies and help in predicting the moves of the opponents, which seriously helps in recognizing alternative strategies to beat the opponent. Thus game theory will help in finding out more creative and broader forms of strategies as opposed to planned and emergent approach. However game theory is not capable of predicting the final outcome of these strategies. Thus game theory is capable of developing strategies where cooperation has the base and are helpful in making the organization profitable. On the other hand it will help in locating the situations where competition will be not profitable for the organization.
Driving Markets Theory
As suggested by Jaworski, Kohli & Sahay (2000) there are mainly two approaches for designing strategies for an organization. They are listed below
Ist Approach: It is traditional and market driven approach and its basis is the understanding of the customer needs and choices along with analysing the actions and strategies of its competitors and regulators in the market.
IInd Approach: The Driving Markets approach where the strategies are designed to influence the competitors and regulators according to the organization thus taking the control of the market. This way the main key business gets focussed and all the forces get driven in this direction only.
In both the approaches the main focus is the customers, competitors and the market in which they have to work together. Thus both the approaches are complimenting each other the market needs to be driven by the driver (Jaworski, Sahay & Kohli 2000). SO a firm can achieve success by implementing both the approaches at the same time first implementing the market driven approach to assist the existing customers and at the same time the market conditions can be tackled using the driving markets approach for planning a course of action for future business. Thus both the strategies need to go hand in hand for satisfying the current needs of the present customers and then in order to attract new customers from the competitors we need to follow the strategies which help in driving the markets in a specific direction.
This way only the marketers can strike a perfect balance in the market to face the future competition effectively and handle the current needs of the customers too at the same time. Thus a firm needs to be customer oriented and at the same time it needs to show steps and actions which depict market driven behaviours complimented by activities which are totally market driving and this will help the firm in displaying positive impacts on the performance of any organization.
References
• Armstrong, J.S. & Clark, T 1997, Review of Barry J. Nalebuff and Adam N.
Brandenburger, Co-opetition 1. Revolutionary Mindset that Redefines Competition and Co-operation 2. The Game Theory Strategy that’s Changing the Game of Business, Journal of Marketing, p 92-95.
• Business Marketing planning, 2003-2011, Essay-Tree, Business marketing planning.
• Business plans and marketing strategy, businessballs.com, viewed on 12 October 2011, http://www.businessballs.com/freebusinessplansandmarketingtemplates.htm
• Pophal, L 2009, a step by step approach to developing a strategic marketing plan, Strategic Communications, LLC-www.startegiccommunications.com.
• McKee, D.O., Varadarajan, R. and Vassar, J. 1990, A taxonomy of marketing planning styles, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Sciences, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 131-41.
• Fredrickson, J. 1983, Strategic process research: questions and recommendations, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 8 No. 4, pp. 565-75.
• Mintzberg, H. 1973, Strategy making in three modes, California Management Review, Vol. 16 No. 2, pp. 44-53.
• Neilson, L.C. 2009, Market Driven or Market driving? Historical evidence from a case study in Nova Scotia’s Tourism Industry, Ottawa, Canada.
• Jaworski, Kohli, A.K. & Sahay, A. 2000, market Driven versus Driving markets, Journal of the academy of marketing science, p 45-54.
GG19
But you can order it from our service and receive complete high-quality custom paper. Our service offers “Marketing” essay sample that was written by professional writer. If you like one, you have an opportunity to buy a similar paper. Any of the academic papers will be written from scratch, according to all customers’ specifications, expectations and highest standards.”
