Marketing Strategy as a Competitive Tool for Performance: Astudy of Manufacturing and Service Industries in India.

Thesis Ph.D. Alliance School of Business, Alliance University 2016 P11010101001

Marketing strategy has been a part of the marketing discourse for quite some time now, and is an established part of marketing science. Lot of research has been done on marketing strategy over this period of time. An area of particular interest is the influence of marketing strategy on business performance. The results of these researches were mixed. Some studies proved a correlation between strategy and performance, while most remained inconclusive. This area has not been adequately researched in the Indian context. It is with the primary objective of researching this correlation between strategy and performance in the Indian context, that this research was undertaken. This research is done in three phases. In the first phase, the objective was to determine whether there exists any pattern with reference to differences in performance among firms depending on their contextual factors. Accordingly approximately 200 firms were chosen from among 8 major industries/categories in India. The first contextual factor chosen for determining significant differences in the pattern of business performance was ownership – i.e. a comparison between domestic firms and foreign owned firms. The primary parameters chosen for measuring performance was sales, profits, ROI etc. Statistical tools used were regression analysis and T-tests. The tests did not throw up any significant difference in performance between these two sets of firms – domestic and foreign owned.
In the second phase of this research, a questionnaire was designed and primary data collected from top company executives. The data collated pertained to overall strategy of different category of firms. Again, no significant difference was observed in strategies pursued by firms, depending on their contextual factors. So, up to this stage, no correlation was observed between strategy and performance of firms depending on contextual factors such as size, age of the firm, ownership etc.