ABSTRACT

Hunt (2017, Advancing marketing strategy in the marketing discipline and beyond: From promise, to neglect, to prominence, to fragment, (to promise?). Journal of Marketing Management. doi:10.1080/0267257X.2017.1326973) provides a synthesis and critical review of over 100 years of marketing literature organised into four eras. In his prognosis of the outlook for Era V, Hunt notes that there are reasons to be optimistic about the prospects for both the marketing discipline, broadly, and the field of strategic marketing, specifically. However, he also draws attention to the concerns voiced by a number of marketing scholars regarding the current state of the field and the future outlook for the field. Hunt argues that the prospects for the marketing discipline and the field of strategic marketing are closely intertwined, and that the health of the latter contributes significantly to that of the former. Against this backdrop, this commentary focuses on the promise of theory for advances in strategic marketing and the advancement of the marketing discipline.

Elaboration

A firm’s marketing strategy encompasses both actions undertaken to enhance its performance, and actions undertaken to hurt the performance of its competitors. Pursuit of a product line proliferation strategy entails considerable managerial time and effort, and financial resources. Therefore, optimally, a firm would make its product offering in just enough forms, flavours, sizes, etc., to maximise its profitability. However, rather than solely focusing on maximising their profitability, firms also introduce their highly successful new product offerings (product offerings that are market share leaders) in more number of forms, flavours, sizes, etc., than needed to maximise their profits, in order to hurt the performance of their present competitors and deter the entry of new competitors. In effect, more so than to enhance its own performance, the dominant firm in an industry pursues a strategy of product line proliferation to pre-empt potential entry points into the product-market, and thereby hurt the performance of its present competitors and deter the entry of new competitors into the market.