A Class with Drucker - Headway | Work on yourself

THE OBJECTIVE OF MARKETING ■ 105
could overcome poor strategy/tactics. Since strategy is frequently divided
into three levels (corporate strategy, marketing strategy, and marketing tactics),
<strong>with</strong> tactics being tied to implementation, by inference he was saying
that good actions at one lower level could overcome a poor decision at a
higher level, i.e. that good marketing tactics could overcome a poor marketing
strategy; that a particularly successful implementation could overcome
the decision to adopt “inappropriate” higher level marketing
strategy/tactics. I knew from my own study of strategy that couldn’t possibly
be correct. In fact, the exact opposite is true.
You may remember the short-lived XFL football league, which lasted
only one season back in 2001. The XFL itself was the brainchild of Vince
McMahon, World Wrestling Federation’s Chairman. The idea was to combine
sport <strong>with</strong> spectacle and duplicate the success of professional
wrestling while presenting “off-season football,” which would not compete
<strong>with</strong> the regular game. That was the strategy. The problem was that
the strategy was wrong. McMahon was ridiculed by mainstream sports
journalists due to the stigma attached to professional wrestling’s image as
being “fake.” Some journalists speculated, only half-jokingly, whether
any of the league’s games were rigged for one side or the other. For the
same reason, football fans were not convinced from the start. The tactics
were pretty good. Good TV coverage, including NBC, who was a partner,
no penalties for roughness, and fewer rules in general. The teams played
their hearts out, and many of the players went on (or back) to the NFL
once the league broke up. But that’s all tactics. Despite good tactics, the
XFL could not overcome the strategy, and it lasted only one season.
<strong>Drucker</strong>’s Principle Holds
I knew that “selling” was one of the tactics of “the Four P’s”. It was basic
that it had to support whatever marketing strategy was decided on. In other
words, if your strategy was to niche the market and sell only to high-end
customers, it made little sense to initiate a low-price tactic. It was incongruent
<strong>with</strong> what the market expected to pay and it affected the image of the
product to your prospects. In a high-end customer strategy, you would distribute
a retail product through Neiman Marcus, not K-Mart.
All of your tactics have to be lined up to support whatever strategy, target
market, etc. that you select. With high-end customers, your price
would tend to be relatively high, you would distribute in ways that would
best reach your market, and the product would be of a quality to match