Marketing strategy, contextual factors and performance: An investigation of their relationship

This research investigates the degree of emphasis put by the Australian manufacturing industry on marketing strategy, along with other organisational strategies such as research and development (R&D), human resources, technology, operations at the functional level. The study found that the emphasis on marketing strategy had a third place after operations and R&D strategy in the past few years. In terms of its effectiveness, marketing strategy has not been as effective as the operations strategy and the technology strategy. The research also investigates the relationship between marketing strategy and organisational performance. The results suggest that the increase in efforts for the development of new market segments/customers is found to be positively associated with the increase in sales growth in domestic and export markets. It is also found that market forecasting has a positive and significant relationship with the return on total assets while the development of new market segments/customers and market share analysis have a negative and significant relationship. The research extends further to investigate whether the emphasis on marketing strategy differs with contextual factors such as firm size, firm's generic strategy, type of market, firm's life cycle stage, etc. The findings suggest that relatively higher emphasis was placed on the marketing strategy by firms which are large, are involved in consumer goods industry, are involved in exports, have high domestic sales growth, and have adopted a differentiation strategy combined with a cost leadership strategy. In conducting this study, a mail survey was carried out to collect information from manufacturing firms across Australia, and 225 responses were received. This was followed by an on‐site interview of some of the senior managers of manufacturing firms in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney.