Abstract
AbstractFormulating consistent marketing strategies is a difficult task, but successfully implementing them is even more challenging. This is even more pertinent as marketing strategies quite often incorporate inherent conflicts between major breakthroughs and consolidation. Consequently, marketers need to balance exploratory and exploitative strategies. However, the literature lacks concrete insights for marketing managers as to how exploratory and exploitative strategies can be best combined. This paper addresses this issue by introducing a framework of multiple types of ambidexterity. Based on qualitative research, tools and procedures are identified to overcome marketing dilemmas and support strategy implementation by drawing on ambidextrous designs.
Highlights
Marketers are faced with a dilemma: they are expected to consolidate their existing business while simultaneously finding new opportunities
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: we provide a brief review of the literature on exploration and exploitation, which we will apply as a conceptual lens to redefine marketing dilemmas
Our understanding is closer to He and Wong’s (2004: 483484) research which defines ambidexterity in relation to technological innovation: “We extend the exploration versus exploitation construct to define ...two generic dimensions (1) an explorative innovation dimension to denote [...] activities aimed at entering new product-market domains, and (2) an exploitative innovation dimension to denote [...] activities aimed at improving existing market positions.”
Summary
Marketers are faced with a dilemma: they are expected to consolidate their existing business while simultaneously finding new opportunities. Notwithstanding the quest for ongoing adaptability of both strategy formulation and implementation processes, studies that focus on intrinsic tradeoffs in marketing strategies are rare These limitations present the starting point for our research and can be best illustrated with reference to the more content-oriented marketing literature where tradeoffs abound. The marketing arena has largely ignored this promising stream of research Against this backdrop, this paper has three objectives: First, it is among the first to apply the concepts of exploration, exploitation, and ambidexterity to the implementation of marketing strategies. We describe variants of ambidexterity which have been suggested to balance the dual processes of exploration and exploitation This leads to our revised framework of ambidexterity, which we use to empirically investigate tools and procedures to support the implementation of seemingly conflicting marketing strategies. We identify some avenues for future research and managerial implications
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