Professor Brown\'s Criticisms the Intent

Professor Brown's Criticisms

The intent of this analysis is to first defend and then refute the Marketing Memo from the text titled Fueling Strategic Innovation by Professor Stephen Brown. Dr. Brown's premise is that marketers have become too analytical, taking too much time researching strategies for satisfying customers and not allowing for marketing imagination and significant consumer impact to pervade marketing strategies. The analytical and research-centric approach to marketing has also created and nurtured more inward centric approaches to innovation which has reduced risk through the quantification of alternatives so the most risk-averse one is chosen (Simanis, Hart, 2009). Critics of this research-centric approach to marketing however contend that it fuels widespread commoditization and the eventual rapid consolidation of markets, leading to financial losses (Kim, Mauborgne, 2004). Taken to an extreme, the continual researching of markets and attempts to quantify them over time can lead to product development plans and marketing strategies that are more imitative than innovative (Ofek, Turut, 2008).

Refuting The Criticism of Professor Brown

The logic of assessing the unmet needs in any given market, organizing them into the most critical, and then creating product strategies based on their congruence to production and service capabilities of a firm is fundamental to the marketing concept. Arguably the foundation of entrepreneurship is based on finding unmet wants and needs of consumers and creating products and services that alleviate pain or satiate wants (Schindehutte, Morris, Kocak, 2008). The methodical research of customers' unmet wants and needs often quantifies them into a series of attributes that both established and emerging companies attempt to fulfill. It is not the act of just creating these products that qualifies as innovation. Rather it is the many decisions with lead to the finished products over time that is an indicator of innovation (Kim, Mauborgne, 2004). Drs. Kim and Mauborgne argue that innovation cannot be bought; it must be nurtured over time through analysis of markets and the developing of unique perspectives on unmet needs of customers. To the extent that a company's strategic marketing planning and market research processes can accurately ascertain the unmet needs of the market, and the company's engineering and new product development processes can translate those needs into a product of relevance to consumers, is the extent to which a company can be successful (Schindehutte, Morris, Kocak, 2008). The foundation of this entire process then is research customer needs and then translating them into products or services of relevance. The entire marketing entrepreneurial ecosystem is predicated on market-based intelligence and the ability to translate it into products and services that needed by customers. In effect, this sequence is the essence of the marketing concept as defined by Kotler as well (Kotler, 1986).

Defending the Criticism of Professor Brown

With the exceptional growth of Web 2.0 technologies (O'Reilly, 2005) and the ubiquity of access to the Internet which is fostering social networking applications' growth (Bernoff, Li, 2008), companies are no longer necessarily in control of their brands, their customers are. The need for being able to create collaborative relationships with customers is critical for the growth of companies long-term. The complexity and depth of these relationships surpasses and in many cases make obsolete the concepts of Kotler (1986). The stage-based approach to quantifying market conditions fro a macroeconomic standpoint and then creating customer profile analysis neglects the rapidly changing voice of the customer (Brandt, 2008) and also neglects the groundswell effect of market conditions over time, enabled by social networking applications (Bernoff, Li, 2008).