European Management ]ournal Volume 7 No 3 0 European Management journal 1989 ISSN 0263-2373 $3.00 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Managing the Competition: Strategic Insights and Implication Douglas Brownlie Lecturer in Marketing Luiz Moutinho Director of Postgraduate Research Department of Management Studies Glasgow Business School University of Glasgow The discipline of marketing draws heavily on viewpoints, concepts and methodologies originating outside its own field of study. As a fairly mature discipline, it can contribute to the development of emerging areas of study as well as benefiting from the new perspectives such new areas bring to specific problems being studied by marketing researchers. This article looks at the potential for exchanging ideas between marketing and strategic management - in particular, reviewing the conceptual and methodological dialogue between the two on the subject of competition. It is thought this will enrich the view of competitive analysis problems adopted within the marketing discipline. Introduction zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA The central concern of strategy formulation at the secondary, or business level is the question of how a business should position itself among its rivals in order to achieve its objectives. It could then be argued that the strategic posture of a business will indicate with whom it chooses to compete and for what. Competitive strategy will then dictate how the business chooses to deploy resources in the pursuit of what it believes to be a sustainable competitive advantage. The technology of marketing provides analytical frameworks and methodologies which help the business to identify, evaluate and exploit the market imperfections which generate opportunities for competitive advantage and disadvantage. This being so, marketing considerations are likely to have an analytical and diagnostic role to play in the search for competitive settings where the business’s unique capabilities match the key success factors of one or more product markets. And since strategic marketing activity generates imperatives for organisational transformation, marketing considerations are also the starting point for the strategic management process. Determining how best to compete in a given product market has traditionally been the domain of marketing management. In the notions of segmentation, targeting and positioning, it provides a conceptually simple, but robust framework for deciding how resources should be invested, using the mix elements as aggregate dimensions of competitive activity, and spending on them as indicators of marketing ambition.’ The question of where to compete, i.e. in which product markets to participate, .is one that firmly places marketing in the arena of strategic management, at a conceptual and methodological level. Both fields of