Marketing as a Strategy
Understanding the CEO’s Agenda for Driving Growth and Innovation
By- Nirmalya Kumar
About the Author
Nirmalya Kumar is Professor of Marketing, Director of Centre for Marketing, and Co-Director for
Aditya V. Birla India Centre at London Business School.
Nirmalya is passionate about marketing and willing to espouse controversial positions. He
believes that the marketing function is currently in crisis. By focusing on the 4P's, marketing is
caught in the whirlpool of corporate obscurity that comes with responsibility for tactical
implementation issues. Instead, for marketing to be relevant to CEOs, it must become strategic,
cross-functional, and bottom-line oriented.
Nirmalya has espoused this message through his 3V model in writing, by teaching at Harvard,
IMD, London Business School, and Northwestern University, as a consultant to over 50 Fortune
500 Companies, and to the press.
Book Review:
It is ironic that while still more firms increasingly talk about customer-focus and CRM, the
marketing function is losing ground to other functions in the firm when it comes to driving
broad organizational initiatives to create value for the customer.
One example is projects to obtain better handling of customer relations (CRM) that focus on
coordinating everything that a firm does towards customers. The CRM philosophy in its nature
transcends the traditional functional silos. As a minimum, it requires that sales, customer
service, call centre, shipping, finance, and obviously marketing will have to cooperate to create
the best total experience for the customer.
It demands a mindset that is strategic, company-wide and focused on the bottom-line. And it
requires the participants' desire and capability to work with advanced IT systems. If marketing
is to lead these extensive projects, it simply isn't enough to be a specialist in tactical issues, such
as market research, creative ad campaigns, printed sales brochures, media plans, or web
content management.
But the future for marketing is still bright, though. At least, this is the opinion of professor
Kumar who now teaches at the London Business School - following eight years as marketing
professor at the Swiss IMD MBA-school. His book is in reality a defense for marketing and
targeted at the top management.
In the new future role, marketing leaders need to help the firm implement organizational
change with a focus of creating value to the customer. This has always been the core theme of
marketing. But to make a difference, marketing people need increasingly to:
Focus less on own functional silo and more on broad and multi-disciplinary activities
across the firm
Focus less on short-term tactics and more on long-term, overall strategy.
Focus less on getting increasing marketing budgets and more on the firm's bottom-line
The book manages to create a number of interesting ideas to increase the status of marketing.
Central in Kumar's work is the 3V-model that covers the following terms:
Valued Customer (who?),
Value Proposition (what?),
And Value Network (how?).
Professor Kumar shows with a lot of illustrative graphics, interesting checklists, and well-
described cases from the real world - e.g. EasyJet -, how his ideas can be converted into
practice.
Kumar urges us to move from superficial market segments to strategic segments, i.e. where the
organization must design separate delivery systems (how?) in order to obtain success.
The marketing philosophy always starts externally at the customer (who?) and works
backwards towards solutions (what?), and finally adapts the firm's delivery system (how?). But
a strong trend during the last decade has been on the internal perspective on core
competences, such as procurement or production. This method means that we start with own
unique capabilities in the delivery system (how?), which then is translated into solutions
(what?) and finally customers (who?). Radical innovation often is created this way, e.g. the
"walkman". In practice of business development, we usually have to work in both directions.
Marketing people will have to do the same.
By drawing your own "who-what-how" profile and do the same for your competitors, you'll
often reach useful conclusions that are valuable for obtaining a real strategic differentiation.
This could push to the strategic innovation with a company-wide perspective. This process
could the marketing function lead.
I find Kumar's book readable, provocative and full of perspective. The father of Marketing Philip
Kotler, has written the preface and this serves a quality award, which it deserves. The two
chapters on brand rationalisation and distribution channels, respectively, are both updated
from the author's articles in Harvard Business Review, which again is a sign of quality
