Over the past decades, we have seen many changes in how we get things done with new technologies, and many companies came to prosperity or decline. The magnitude of this problem expands into many fields of management, while in particular, marketing personnel work in the frontier by engaging customers and managing profitable customer relationships (Philip Kotler 2018), will take first initiatives in a company and respond to the changes. This paper explores the possibilities of building a successful marketing strategy even when our product is about to be obsolete.
Ideally, new product development process as both a part of marketing discipline and engineering discipline, should have more integrated approaches when trying to capture the future trends, while in practice, many companies have isolated marketing departments and R&D departments under specialization framework. Griffin and Hauser (1996)’s work on marketing-research and development(R&D) integration suggested multiple communication barriers between R&D personnel and marketing personnel, including perceptual barrier in personalities, education-based cultural thought-worlds differences, different technical terms based on product benefits or specifications, different task priorities and responsibilities, and physical barriers. Despite this awareness, it is also found that hybrid R&D organizations do not consistently yield innovation that is ‘intermediate’ between that of fully decentralized and fully centralized organizations (Nicholas S. Argyres 2004), this brings further complication to designing organizational structure with innovative intentions.
This problem persists in other fields of management, at the meantime, marketing personnel are always the “first response team” to detect the consumers’ behavioral changes, and the frontline of protecting the company’s profitability. Therefore, in this paper, we suggest that marketing department, as a functional, independent team, should take early initiative to respond in the following two areas: the first is to protect the sales of current products as much as possible, this could buy us some valuable time for our R&D department in order to make a proper response to the disruptive technologies; the second is to anticipate our opponents’ moves, therefore, plan ahead our matching responses with marketing tools.
In order to do so, this paper start with a cross-case analysis based on the past understandings of defensive marketing strategy and disruptive technology, 5 cases of disruptive technology are selected to provide an analysis on the challenges presented, then we will discuss the actions of dealing with disruptive technology in different stages. Different from the previous approaches to this problem, this paper will be heavily based on psychology studies for following reasons: (1) Better understanding of consumers’ motivation in choosing the products (2) Better efficiency in targeting and communicating with customers. (3) Better understanding of campaign goals. (4) Different angles to address marketing challenges.
In the early stage, to detect the changes in consumer behavior therefore to understand the potential disruption as early as possible, this alone might stop the disruption if the management realizes such potential and implement this technology early on; there are still actions can be taken even the disruption is perceivable, including early reinforcement by socializing the product, avoiding the attack by shifting the product segment, still, in the new segment the marketing resources needs to be restructured to operate at better efficiency, or go through radical restructuring if everything has failed.
The structure of this paper as following: throughout the paper, we begin with a brief review of the past research on disruptive technologies and defensive marketing, and then we discuss how psychology might help in such scenario. In section 3, we will discuss the methodology that will be used in the paper, then in the section 4 and 5, we will discuss the analysis and strategies in detail.
This paper explored the possibility of designing a marketing strategy against disruptive technology. The analysis shows that connecting defensive marketing strategies and psychology theories are among the paper's most important findings. As of the nature of defensive scenarios, the long period of the campaign should and need to be planned beforehand, this might as well be guided by theories like psychology to increase effectiveness. The psychology-based strategy building process can also be further developed, this paper showed the unique approaches in psychology, especially the “stimulus-response” approach, can be useful in unclear situations like a hardly foreseeable disruption.
Limitations. This research only takes account of more accepted cases, as Danneels (2004) suggested, the theories on disruptive technology still have questions to be answered, namely, the inherent disruptiveness of the technology, resource-based views as of incumbents, as well as how the disruptive technology change the base of competition by introducing new dimensions of attributes previously unexplored. These questions should be answered in the future to provide a more accurate analysis, therefore, to have a more pluralistic assessment from marketing side.
