Adapting a book to make a film: how strategy is adapted through professional practices of marketing middle managers

Abstract

For an organisation to be competitive its strategy must be highly responsive to both environmental challenges and customers continuously shifting demands. Yet many organisations treat strategy making as an exclusively top management concern, even though the top management team is often remote from the daily interactions and communications taking place at the organisation, market, and customer interface. We challenge the assumption that strategy making ‘belongs’ to top managers and argue that marketing middle managers, possessing expert market and customer knowledge and insights, adapt top manager’s strategy to shifting customer demands in a changing environment. We explore this argument by adopting a strategy-as-practice perspective and analysing marketing middle manager’s practices across three case companies operating in a dynamic retail environment. Our research enables two key contributions. Our primary confirmation is to demonstrate that marketers are not passive implementers, but active adapters of top management strategy through three critical practices of sensing, challenging, and transmitting. We use the novel analogy of how adapting a book to make a film involves minor changes to the story line and characters to suit the new medium and to illustrate the strategically relevant and influential role marketing plays in adapting the strategy developed by the top management team for implementation. By demonstrating the value of the strategic practices of functional middle managers we also contribute to the growing debate of the need for greater inclusion and transparency in strategy making.

Keywords:

• adaptation
• marketing practice
• marketing relevance
• middle-managers

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Browne

Dr. Sarah Browne is Assistant Professor in Marketing and Strategy at Trinity College Dublin. Sarah’s main areas of interest are in strategic marketing, retail marketing, and strategy-as-practice, particularly from a middle manager perspective. She has presented several papers at leading international conferences relating to various aspects of marketing’s direct and indirect influence on strategy-shaping activity within organisations, based on her extensive case studies of Irish retail organisations.

Pamela Sharkey-Scott

Dr. Pamela Sharkey Scott is Senior Lecturer, Strategy and International Business and Research Fellow at the College of Business, DIT. Pamela’s research interests focus on strategy development processes, capability development, and knowledge management in large organisations, particularly from a middle manager perspective. She has published in several international journals including Journal of International Business Studies, Organization Studies, and Journal of International Management.

Vincent Mangematin

Prof. Vincent Mangematin is Professor and Scientific Director at Grenoble Ecole de Management, France. His research interests lie within innovation and the evolution of technologies, business models, and institutions. In analysing the conditions of change and the dynamics of innovation within different industries, Vincent has published in several leading journals including Strategic Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, Technovation, and Journal of Business Strategy.

Katrina Lawlor

Dr. Katrina Lawlor is Head of Graduate Business School at Dublin Institute of Technology. Her research interests include advertising, brand symbolism, marketing theory, and semiotics. Her work has previously been published in the Journal of Marketing Management, edited books, and conference proceedings.

Laura Cuddihy

Laura Cuddihy is a Lecturer in Marketing, Selling and Sales Management at the School of Marketing in Dublin Institute of Technology. She teaches undergraduate, post-graduate, and executive education courses. She is actively involved in research in these fields and also in the area of educational research. She was awarded the DIT Business Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in 2005 and was short-listed for the National Marketing Educator of the Year Award in 2007. Prior to her role in DIT, Laura Cuddihy worked in Sales and Marketing roles for seven years at Smith and Nephew Ireland Consumer and Medical divisions.