Organizational Culture and Positioning 77 Organizations can and do exercise some degree of strategic choice when adapting to competitive pressures . . . from a cognitive perspec- tive, decision makers act on a mental model of the environment.
(Porac and Thomas, 1990: 224)
The way that an organization and the members of that organization see the world will guide decisions about strategy and how the organization is perceived externally. The customer may not be aware of the strategy but will be aware of, and responsive to, the behaviours that nurture and feed the strategy as portrayed by the buyer–seller relationship. This will characterize the personality of the organization, or strategic positioning, in the mind of the customer:
Academic literature has often described strategy as if it were the end product of a long development process. Firms are supposed to make strategic decisions only after exhaustive analysis of both their com- petitive advantage and the industrial environment . . . Decisions are made quickly, based on experience and intuition as well as through analysis. (Maljers, 1990: 64)
A balance between top–down and bottom–up driven strategy is often determined by the culture and philosophy of the company involved.
Corporate level strategy can only be built on the basis of bottom–up willingness and ability to undertake the top–down approach of the organization. These competencies and capabilities are therefore a for- mative part of strategy. Companies with strategies that are based upon developing and exploiting clearly defined internal capabilities have been adept at adjusting to and exploiting external change (Grant, 1992:
95). Communication of a value proposition that reflects a set of values and beliefs and puts the customer first is a critical role of the marketing manager (Webster, 1992).
The integration of a good fit between competencies and customers, and updating that strategic fit, is a major strategic challenge (Normann and Ramirez, 1993). This requires a constant learning process that flour- ishes on the review and understanding of a continually changing envir- onment. Successful companies regard strategy as ‘systematic social innovation: the continuous design and redesign of complex business systems’ with the underlying strategic goal ‘to create an ever-improving fit between competencies and customers’ (Normann and Ramirez, 1993:
66). The value-creating system is about ‘the reconfiguration of roles and relationships among [a] constellation of actors’ (ibid.). This view is
supported by Gronroos (1994: 8) who suggests that the whole company is required to have an appropriate marketing attraction to customers, noting that ‘a large number of persons . . . such as research and develop- ment, design, deliveries, customer training, invoicing and credit management has a decisive impact on the marketing success’. This is a reflection of a particular culture depicted by personality traits revealed by the activities and behaviours of various contributors within the organization resulting in the strategic perception or positioning of the business in the mind of the customer.
It has been argued that: ‘In general, the greater the rate of change in a company’s external environment, the more it must seek to base long term strategy upon its internal resources and capabilities, rather than upon an external market focus’ (Grant, 1995; Hooley, Saunders and Piercy, 1998). The resource-based view of the firm (RBV) is not necessarily restricted to physical resources, and includes intangible resources such as brand names or know-how, and even organizational capability rooted in company routines, processes and culture (Collis and Mont- gomery, 1995). A strong and confident personality gives a company the opportunity to operate top–down and bottom–up strategic planning simultaneously when markets are moving rapidly. This does not mean that people who share the same core values and purpose all think or look the same (Collins and Porras, 1996) because diversity may itself be an important core ideology. In fact, the most likely source of ortho- doxy, or even the status quo, is from the top: ‘Where are you likely to find people with the least diversity of experience, the largest investment in the past, and the greatest reverence for industrial dogma? At the top’
(Hamel, 1996: 74).
The philosophy of the business will determine the balance between people and technology and the way that people use the available tools (Vasilash, 1997). The provision of technology as a resource for differen- tiating products from the competition is a different matter from the willingness and ability to use the technology. Hooley, Saunders and Piercy (1998) propose a linkage between competitive positioning as an iterative relationship between market orientation and RBV, pointing out that the ability to learn and adapt to changing circumstances is central to the development of a sustainable competitive advantage.
Rucci, Kirn and Quinn (1998) report that Sears executives rebuilt the company in the early 1990s around its customers by devising a business model that tracked success from management behaviour through employee attitudes to customer satisfaction and financial performance.
The creation of the model and the measures taken changed the way
Organizational Culture and Positioning 79 that executives thought and behaved. However, highlighting the rele- vance of employee attitudes, strategic thinking and planning is gener- ally iterative and exists within the psyche of the organization. These organizational arrangements or structures sustain positioning-focus (Heracleous, 1998).
Collis and Montgomery (1998) suggest a link between company resources, culture and the relatedness of strategy with companies looking too closely at similarities in products rather than similarities in resources when entering new business fields. Often, fashion dictates the alignment of corporate strategies rather than any attempt to tailor organizational structures and systems to strategic needs. If following fashion is part of the cultural and institutionalized factors, then this will be the driving force of strategic thinking and planning. Hooley, Saunders and Piercy (1998: 103) suggest: ‘the attractiveness of markets will depend, in part, on the resources available to the firm to build a strong competitive position’ and recognize that ‘senior managers may tend to defend orthodoxy because it is what they know, and what they have built their careers on’ (102). Managers should focus more on com- petitors, as defined by customers, because competitor values, skills, resources, strengths and weaknesses are dependent upon the type of mental models constructed by managers within their own existing environment (Clark and Montgomery, 1999). Practising marketing managers’ understanding is ‘arbitrary and superstitious in the sense that it is adaptive and contextual’ with a willingness to accept ambiguity, whilst academics have a tendency to avoid the clutter that falls outside accepted theory (Carson, Devinney, Dowling, and John, 1999: 129).
This same limitation is emphasized by Srivastava, Shervani and Fahey (1999: 169): ‘If marketing as an intellectual and operating discipline is to be institutionalized in organizations, it must not only pervade the minds of managers within the organization, but also infuse and ener- gize their actions. In short, it must influence the processes by which work gets done’.
Increasingly there is the feeling that marketing is not so much a func- tion as a set of values and processes used by all business functions (Moorman and Rust, 1999) and ‘structures, coordination mechanisms, and cultures need to be developed that encourage flexibility, adaptability, and cross-functional sharing of information’ (Homburg, Workman and Jensen, 2000: 461). This suggests that success at adapting to the sur- rounding environment is governed by the way an organization not only perceives the environment, but also the way it responds internally and is willing to change to meet new challenges.