This blog post examines how a Marketing Doctrine looks like based on the article by Challagalla,Murtha and Jaworski (2014) that was featured in a LinkedIn piece.
Marketing doctrine refers to a firm’s unique principles, distilled from its experiences, which provide firm-wide guidance on market-facing choices
Challagalla,Murtha and Jaworski (2014)
If you think about it, the marketing logic of both Marketing Doctrines start jumping out. Here are a few to think about:
- Change in sauces is much slower than cell phones: If you think of the sauce market in the US, the major innovation has been Sriracha hot sauce but no major sauce maker has probably gone out of business. Think cell phones and and the devastation of Blackberry and the recent moves by Amazon Fire come to mind. So the Apple doctrine of being willing to cannibalize your own product seems to make great sense,
- Focus groups matter more to the consumer product company because their category is a lot about loyalty. Your customers might buy more bottles of competitor Sriracha sauce but will not entirely stop using your brand… particularly if you come up with a “hot” version for your brand loyalists.
- Innovation is upstream in high tech and downstream in low tech: High tech industries like cell phones, biotech require that innovation is build into the early ideation,design and usability stages of new product development. On the other hand, low tech consumer products like sauces is a lot about the innovative consumer facing launch activities like sales promotion and sampling.
While above examples are from different industries, the point of the Marketing Doctrine is to separate yourself from competitors in your own industry. Thus, the Apple Marketing Doctrine would be very different from the Samsung Marketing Doctrine. More on developing a Marketing Doctrine in a later post.