Abstract
For the long-term success of a business, creating and maintaining a sustainable strategic position is crucial. Being everything to everybody is not sustainable, as it does not protect the company from imitators. According to Porter (1996) and Tellier & Pecaut (1995) trade-offs are necessary to create a sustainable position because they force the company to make choices and limit what they offer. These authors assert that managers have been led to believe that operational effectiveness eliminates the need for trade-offs, however the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Porter (1996), for example, states that through the years managers have concentrated on achieving operational effectiveness rather than strategy development. Management tools, such as TQM, benchmarking and outsourcing have replaced strategy. Even though both - operational effectiveness and strategy - are necessary for superior performance, they play different roles. Operational effectiveness is performing similar activities better than competitors, while strategy means performing different activities from competitors or performing similar activities in different ways. Operational effectiveness is an interesting issue as it exemplifies what a vast majority of companies are doing. All companies seem to be interested in being at the forefront of the productivity frontier, without considering that even though constant improvement in operational effectiveness is necessary for superior profitability it is not enough for overall competitiveness. Tucker et al (1987) state that competitive benchmarking -one of the tools used to achieve operational effectiveness - is not capable of identifying a competitive advantage. The only thing it achieves is identifying ways in which a company can imitate the best in their industry.
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Keywords
- Operational Effectiveness
- Company Performance
- Productivity Frontier
- Strategy Variable
- AUSTRALIAN Company
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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© 2015 Academy of Marketing Science
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Ibrahim, E. ., Joseph, M. (2015). The Development Process Of Strategic Marketing Plans In Uk And Australian Companies: A Preliminary Investigation. In: Spotts, H. (eds) Proceedings of the 2002 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference. Developments in Marketing Science: Proceedings of the Academy of Marketing Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11882-6_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11882-6_10
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