IMS · Marketing Strategy Implementation as Source of Firms´ Competitive Advantage

How can innovative marketing strategies be effectively implemented? While marketing scholars agree widely on the importance of effective strategy implementation for strategies’ performance outcomes, effective implementation of innovative marketing strategies and its relationship to firm performance is still not understood well.As a result, while firms invest significant amounts of resources in the implementation of their marketing strategies, many implementation initiatives fall far behind expectations and more often than not firms’ considerable investments in innovative strategies do not result, if at all, in notable effects on their performance. Against this background, the proposed research aims at investigating the effective implementation of innovative marketing strategies and how strategy implementation efforts affect both, the strategy-performance link and the sustainability of firms´ competitive advantage. Theoretically, this research is a much-needed step toward better understanding one of marketing´s key concepts (i.e., marketing strategy implementation). Given the scattered and fragemented research on the subject, the proposed research is likely to break ground for and inspire a systematic research stream on marketing strategy implementation in the future. From a managerial perspective, the findings will inform firms about effective ways to substantially improve the returns on their investment in innovative marketing strategies. As European firms must increasingly focus on the development of innovative marketing strategies to excel on global markets, this knowledge will help them to gain and sustain leading positions on their markets—and prevent them from having great strategies, but nevertheless failing on the market.