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'Marketing' & 'Strategy' - misused or misunderstood? | Discuss

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I've spent the past 20 plus years building a professional life across many different organizations and career tracks. After an undergraduate education and a brief reservist miltary experience, I completed a doctorate in Microbiology in grad school, followed by any number of postdocs, a stint as an R&D scientist in the sterilization / decontamination industry, went back to grad school for an MBA, and then spent time in technical sales, sales management and marketing in the biotechnology industry. Yet irrespective of industry and job role I've come across the following situation many times - in American English as currently used 'tactic' and 'strategy' seem to be interchangeable, especially the use of the words strategy or strategic when tactic or tactical is more appropriate.

The question is: is this interchanging due to the misunderstanding of the difference between strategy and tactic, or is it an erosion of the meaning through popular and sloppy misuse of the words because, well - 'strategic' sounds more grandiose than 'tactical'? I have my opinions and I'll charge right ahead .... so consider this a spoiler alert! If you have thoughts and ideas, please make a comment at the tail of this blog.

Both strategy and tactic have their origins in the ancient Greek language and are related to the military history of the Classical Greek era. Strategy is descended from the word strategos στρατηγός- meaning General. In the city state democracies of ancient Greece such as Athens, multiple generals were elected annually from among the citizens of the city and in time of war they were jointly responsible for the organizing and deployment of the citizens as a field army. This included not only the logistics and engineering of defences or offensive siege weapons but also the choosing of the time and place of battle - or even whether to fight or not at all. Often the strategoi were elected from among the political classes and it was common to hold the office multiple times in a career. In the more autocratic societies such as Sparta and Macedon (in slightly later times), the king held the role of strategos autokrator - commander-in-chief. To learn more search "strategos" in Wikipedia - lots of good stuff! I've hyperlinked out to Wikipedia to help you get started.

So, what about "tactic"?? Well this is derived from the Greek work taktike the best definition of which I found here is from answers.com, hyperlinked for you convenience. Briefly: "taktika, matters pertaining to arrangement, or from Greek taktikē (tekhnē), (art) of deploying forces in war, both from taktikos, of order, from taktos, arranged, from tassein, tag-, to arrange." So in essence a tactic is how you choose to arrange or deploy your resources to achieve the goals identified by strategy. Thus a tactic is the means by which you accomplish an end (as in 'the end justifies the means').

Therefore in summary, a strategos (general) would answer 5 key questions: Who? What? Why? When? Where? This suggests that in modern use 'strategy' or 'strategic' should relate to at least one of these "five Ws" as part of a planning or objective development process. If it doesn't you're probably meaning 'tactic' or 'tactical' and are talking about how to do something rather that what needs to be done. Obviously to execute a strategic plan it is necessary to build out a tactical plan for accomplishing the identified goals or objectives. This is best exemplified by this entry in wikipedia concerning military tactics in the modern era. "In current military thought, tactics are the lowest level of planning, involving small units ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred men. Units are organized into formations, comprising a higher level of planning known as the operational use of forces. The third tier of military planning is strategic, which is concerned with the overall means and plan for achieving a long-term outcome. Operational warfare is thus an intermediate level in which the aim is to convert the strategy (highest level) into tactics (lowest level of planning)."

So how about 'marketing' what's the issue there? Well it turns out that a LOT of people, including business people, use marketing and advertising interchangeably. While advertising is an element of marketing - one method of Promotion (of the 4 Ps of Marketing), it is not the whole plan by and of itself. In fact, just like strategy and tactics can be misunderstood or misused, so can Marketing and Advertising.

In fact I view Marketing as a highly strategic discipline which I call "Market Strategy" that actually is a key input to the strategic objectives of any business or organization, to product or service development and to the formulation of a Marketing Plan. Advertising is one of many different tactics for executing that Marketing Plan. A diagram showing my thoughts on how Marketing is Strategic can be downloaded from the link and pictured here:

I think you'll see now why I spent so long discussing strategy and tactics. Please feel free to share your thoughts on what Marketing  and Strategy encompass.

>matt