The Contributions of Marketing to Strategic Management

Marketing helps strategic management at a philosophical, conceptual, and methodological level. Theory-building contributions are few. The marketing concept stresses that customers are the focal point of strategy. Marketing defines the environment in terms that customers think are important. Segmentation partitions customers into groups with common needs and the positioning concept frames strategic choice as decisions about which segments to serve and with whom to compete. An emerging theory of market evaluation helps dynamic analysis of customers, competitors, and strategic choices.