Michael Song, Robert W. Nason, and C. Anthony Di Benedetto
Executive Summary
The strategic typology of Miles and Snow (1978) has received much attention in the marketing and management literature and is still commonly applied today. Miles and Snow envision strategy as the patterns in the decisions by which a strategic business unit (SBU) aligns itself with its environment, and they categorize SBUs according to these patterns. The critical underlying variable in their typology is the rate of change in an SBU’s products or markets. Using an exploratory empirical study, Miles and Snow propose four strategic types—prospectors, analyzers, defenders, and reactors—and suggest that each of the first three types chooses a different competitive strategy with respect to products and/or markets: Prospectors will innovate technologically and seek out new markets, analyzers will prefer a “second-but-better” strategy, and defenders will focus on maintaining a secure niche in a relative stable product or service area. Miles and Snow suggest that all three of these strategic types can be successful if the SBU matches its strategy to the competitive environment and develops and deploys appropriate capabilities.
Capabilities can be defined as “complex bundles of skills and accumulated knowledge that enable firms to coordinate activities and make use of their assets” (Day 1990, p. 38). In this study, Song, Nason, and Di Benedetto examine the relationship between Miles and Snow’s strategic type and four capability constructs: technology, market linking, marketing, and information technology. Day (1994) suggests that both technology and market-linking capabilities are critical to sustained competitive advantage and superior performance.
Song, Nason, and Di Benedetto first examine the relationships between an SBU’s strategic type and its development of the four distinctive organizational capability constructs. This research extends Miles and Snow’s stream in that it attempts to quantify and better understand these relationships.
Next, Song, Nason, and Di Benedetto build and test hypotheses regarding cross-national differences and their effects on the relationships between strategic type selection and the capabilities, a topic in which no empirical work has been conducted so far. The authors gather empirical data from the United States, China, and Japan. They selected China and Japan because of their large purchasing power; they, plus the United States, are the three largest economies worldwide as measured by purchasing power.
Song, Nason, and Di Benedetto first propose a set of four hypotheses relating an SBU’s relative capabilities to its selection of strategic type; next, they propose four additional hypotheses expressing expected cross-national differences in the magnitudes of the capabilities. They then test these hypotheses using a data set of 709 managers from the United States, Japan, and China. Their empirical results largely confirm these hypotheses. They conclude by providing theoretical implications and some possible prescriptions for managers seeking to improve their organization’s strategy selection.
Biography
Michael Song holds the Charles N. Kimball, MRI/Missouri Endowed Chair in Management of Technology and Innovation, is Professor of Marketing, and is Executive Director of Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). Song is ranked as the “World’s Top Innovation Management Scholar,” one of the top 20 technology management scholars, and among the “Most-Cited Scientists in Economics & Business” over a ten-year period. He received the 2005 Excellence in Research Award, which was presented by the American Marketing Association to the author of the best paper that has significantly influenced the direction of global marketing in the past ten years. Song serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals. His work has appeared in Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of International Marketing, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, among other publications.
Robert Nason is Professor of Marketing at Michigan State University, where he was chairperson for 21 years. He served three terms as Editor of Journal of Macromarketing, was the first President of the Macromarketing Society, where he remains a Board member, and was on the Board of the International Society of Marketing and Development. He has done research and executive programs for the U.S. Agency for International Development, been on the faculties of the Wharton School and the University of Rhode Island, and been Visiting Professor at Colorado State University and Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok, Thailand). His research interests include external consequences of micromarketing actions, public policies, and marketing in economic development in both emerging and advanced economies. His work has appeared in Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Retailing, and Singapore Marketing Review, among other publications.
Anthony Di Benedetto is Professor of Marketing at Temple University and Editor of Journal of Product Innovation Management. He holds a BSc (Chemistry), MBA (Marketing), and PhD (Marketing and Management Science) from McGill University (Montreal, Canada) and is a certified New Product Development Professional (NPDP). His work has been published in Journal of Product Innovation Management, Management Science, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of International Business Studies, and IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, among other publications. His research interests include new product development, product innovation, and international product launch strategy. He has previously taught at University of Kentucky and Université du Québec à Montréal, and he has been Visiting Professor at McMaster University (Canada) and Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands).
Journal of International Marketing, Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2008
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