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The term ‘strategy’ is one of the most frequently used terms in business, and its application in marketing is particularly common. Company strategy, market strategy, marketing strategy, sales strategy, promotion strategy, distribution strategy, low pricing strategy – it would take a long time to list all of them. Although this term is so commonly in use, its definition is not as straightforward and it can be interpreted in different ways. In comparison with tactical decisions, strategy is much more significant for an organisation as it brings long-lasting consequences. It is implemented by higher level managers on a regular basis, and it is based on external, often subjective information, so decisions – especially at the time they are made – are difficult to evaluate.

Taking into consideration the fact that strategy refers to a long-term rather than a short-term period, strategic decisions serve as the basis for undertaking operational activities. However, marketing refers to the market and the competition. It is possible to claim that marketing strategy is trying to find an answer to the question to which path an organisation should follow in order to achieve its goals and objectives. If, for example, a company has a goal to generate a profit of PLN 1 million by selling 100,000 pieces of a product, the market strategy should answer at least the following two questions:

1. Who will be our target group, for example, who will purchase the 100,000 pieces of the product?

2. Why is it us from whom a potential buyer should purchase the product?

Who will be our target group, for example, who will purchase the 100,000 pieces of the product?

Why is it us from whom a potential buyer should purchase the product?

The target market will be defined if a reply to the first question is provided. The second question identifies the foundations of competitive advantage. These two issues, that is, target market and competitive advantage are the strategic marketing issues. You cannot change your target group unexpectedly while competitive advantage is the basis for changing decisions regarding prices, promotions and sales.

This chapter describes the measures of marketing activities which refer to strategic aspects and testify a company’s market position – the measures of the performance of target groups and competitive advantage. Readers’ attention should be also focused on the indices that are less popular in Poland and, therefore, may be underestimated. It seems that some of them, for example, the index of marketing resources allocation and the marketing risk index, provide a lot of valuable information and, at the same time, make it possible to show the value of marketing investments. Their wider use in the near future is only a matter of time.

The following is an introductory profile of the fastest growing firms over the three-year period of the study listed by corporate reputation ranking order. The business activities in which the firms are engaged are outlined to provide background information for the reader.

It is generally recognised that companies spend approximately 50% of their marketing budget on promotional activities. Advertising belongs to the most visible areas of a company’s activity. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the average recipient associates marketing with advertising, competitions and leaflets about new promotions delivered to houses or offices. Advertising, especially Internet advertising, is one of the most effective forms of marketing and one of the fastest developing areas of business. New channels of communication are emerging all the time – the Internet, digital television, mobile telephony; accompanied by new forms, such as the so-called ambient media. Advertising benefits from the achievements of many fields of science, that is, psychology, sociology, statistics, medicine and economics. At the same time, it combines science and the arts – it requires both knowledge and intuition. Contemporary advertising has different forms and areas of activity; yet it is always closely linked with the operations of a company – it is a form of marketing communication.

The indices of marketing communication presented in this chapter are generally known and used not only by advertising agencies but also by the marketing departments of many organisations. Brand awareness, advertising scope and frequency, the penetration index or the response rate belong to the most widely used indices; others, like the conversion rate or the affinity index, will get increasingly more significant along with the process of professionalisation of the environment of marketing specialists in Poland and with increased pressure on measuring marketing activities. Marketing indices are used for not only planning activities, but also their evaluation; some of them, such as telemarketing, mailing and coupons, provide an extensive array of possibilities of performance evaluation.

The study this chapter reports focuses on how network theory contributes to the understanding of the internationalization process of SMEs and measures the effect of network capability on performance in international trade and has three research objectives.

The first objective of the study relates to providing new insights into the international market development activities through the application of a network perspective. The chapter reviews the international business literature to ascertain the development of thought, the research gaps, and the shortcomings. This review shows that the network perspective is a useful and popular theoretical domain that researchers can use to understand international activities, particularly of small, high technology, resource-constrained firms.

The second research objective is to gain a deeper understanding of network capability. This chapter presents a model for the impact of network capability on international performance by building on the emerging literature on the dynamic capabilities view of the firm. The model conceptualizes network capability in terms of network characteristics, network operation, and network resources. Network characteristics comprise strong and weak ties (operationalized as foreign-market entry modes), relational capability, and the level of trust between partners. Network operation focuses on network initiation, network coordination, and network learning capabilities. Network resources comprise network human-capital resources, synergy-sensitive resources (resource combinations within the network), and information sharing within the network.

The third research objective is to determine the impact of networking capability on the international performance of SMEs. The study analyzes 11 hypotheses through structural equations modeling using LISREL. The hypotheses relate to strong and weak ties, the relative strength of strong ties over weak ties, and each of the eight remaining constructs of networking capability in the study. The research conducts a cross-sectional study by using a sample of SMEs drawn from the telecommunications industry in Ireland.

The study supports the hypothesis that strong ties are more influential on international performance than weak ties. Similarly, network coordination and human-capital resources have a positive and significant association with international performance. Strong ties, weak ties, trust, network initiation, synergy-sensitive resources, relational capability, network learning, and information sharing do not have a significant association with international performance. The results of this study are strong (R2=0.63 for performance as the outcome) and provide a number of interesting insights into the relations between collaboration or networking capability and performance.

This study provides managers and policy makers with an improved understanding of the contingent effects of networks to highlight situations where networks might have limited, zero, or even negative effects on business outcomes. The study cautions against the tendency to interpret networks as universally beneficial to business development and performance outcomes.

Management and especially strategy research rely heavily on the use of ratios to measure a variety of firm, industry, and societal characteristics. Most often, these ratios are created simply to control for size effects (i.e., scaling) emanating from differences in the size of firms, industries, populations, or national economies on the variables of interest. In addition, ratios may also hold theoretical meaning apart from that of their components. Despite the popularity of ratios and regardless of their purpose, the use of ratios is not without controversy. In particular, several studies have demonstrated that the use of ratio measures in correlations and multiple regressions can exaggerate relations of interest leading to biased and unstable results. In this chapter, I review the debate surrounding the use of ratio measures, discuss the problems for estimation and inference that are likely to arise when ratios are used in statistical estimation, and provide alternatives to the use of ratio variables that still satisfy the purpose for which ratio measures are often created.

What is the scope of brokerage network to be considered in thinking strategically? Given the value of bridging structural holes, is there value to being affiliated with people or organizations that bridge structural holes? The answer is “no” according to performance associations with manager networks, which raises a question about the consistency of network theory across micro to macro levels of analysis. The purpose here is to align manager evidence with corresponding macro evidence on the supplier and customer networks around four-digit manufacturing industries in the 1987 and 1992 benchmark input–output tables. In contrast to the manager evidence, about 24% of the industry-structure effect on industry performance can be attributed to structure beyond the industry's own buying and selling, to networks around the industry's suppliers and customers. However, the industry evidence is not qualitatively distinct from the manager evidence so much as it describes a more extreme business environment.

While management-accounting research continues to focus on cost drivers, research has recently begun to examine revenue drivers. We review the research on revenue drivers with reference to five revenue-driver models in the accounting literature. The revenue drivers identified by quantitative empirical research are located in a revenue-driver model based on their levels of analysis (customer, product, organization, industry) and other characteristics of a revenue driver–revenue relation. Implications of this model for research are discussed.

This paper focuses on customer value analysis and measurement, framing customer value management as one of the main antecedents of the company value-creation process. The paper builds on three main pillars. First, the paper highlights the critical role of customer value in business-to-business markets, focusing on the links between the company's ability to manage customer value-creation processes and the positive financial and economic outcomes generated by loyalty effects. Secondly, the paper develops key analytical stages for an understanding of customer value. The focus is on the customer value-chain concept, including consideration of the customer information and acquisition process and its decision rules. Third, the paper illustrates the measurement process, offering an organizational framework for selecting the most suitable method for measuring perceived customer value. The methodological alternatives range from desk measures (e.g., technical computation of the total cost of ownership (TCO)) to field analysis, like those considered under both compositional and the decomposition approaches (e.g., conjoint analysis). The paper concludes with remarks on the managerial implications of these measures, as well as offering suggestions for further research on value for the customer.

To create and sustain a resource-based competitive advantage, managers acquire and develop specialized resources as they grow their firms. The authors argue that an important part of committing to a resource-based strategy is a willingness to keep spending on specialized resources during periods when sales and profits are down. The authors seek to validate this conjecture by examining whether such resource-based commitment to a customer-centered strategy results in improved customer satisfaction. The authors use the stickiness of selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses to capture this commitment empirically. The authors first document that future customer satisfaction is positively associated with SG&A cost stickiness, consistent with the premise that the retention of specialized SG&A resources during low demand periods helps firms to build and maintain relationships with customers over time. Next, the authors test whether expected future benefits of customer satisfaction are enhanced when SG&A cost stickiness is higher. The authors find that the positive relation between Tobin’s Q and customer satisfaction is positively moderated by SG&A cost stickiness. Finally, the authors test whether earnings persistence, a quality of earnings associated with sustained performance over time, is positively associated with the interaction between customer satisfaction and SG&A cost stickiness. The authors find that it is. Their evidence supporting these predictions is consistent with the conjecture that resource-based commitment reflected in cost stickiness is an important dimension of creating and sustaining a resource-based competitive advantage.