The Basics of Marketing Strategy: Where is the Customer?

Strategic Management sometimes claims to provide an answer to one of the most difficult questions in our understanding of competitive markets: how to recognize and then achieve an economic advantage that endures. In attempting to do so, it has had to address the continual tension between analysis and action, or in more common managerial terms between formulation and implementation. At the same time, marketing strategy has also had to address a perhaps more fundamental question: how far at least from a market or demand perspective can we ever develop general rules for achieving enduring economic advantage.

In this paper, we will also consider a further issue: the limited extent to which a full demand perspective, focussed around the nature of the customer, has been incorporated within the development of the teaching and analysis of marketing strategy during the last twenty-five years and the prospects for future developments.