Ironic Marketing

Ella A.
July 03, 2010

Strategic management has become so important to today’s corporations because there is a search to the answer of: “How does a company become successful and stay successful?” (p. 1, text). With increasing technology innovations coming into the market over time, companies always need to review and restructure their strategies to not only become successful, but to also stay successful. In today’s market, as soon as one company finds a way to success another is planning on finding a better way to success to knock out competition. A company must always be prepared for immediate advancement, and plan on making it happen. This is where building a strategy comes in.

Strategic management has now evolved to the point that its primary value is to help the organization operate successfully in a dynamic, complex environment… Because it takes less and less time for one product or technology to replace another, companies are finding that permanent competitive advantage does not exist. (p. 3, text)

A recent personal example I came to realize is as follows. I bought a Nook, which is a Barnes & Noble e-reader back in February. When I bought it, it was mainly for reading, this was the time when its main competitor was the Kindle the Amizon.com e-reader. Both these e-readers were close in technology, with the exception that the Nook has page-like reading screen technology where the screen looks like the page of a book, so unlike the Kindle it wouldn’t give off a glare in the lighting. A short time later after my purchase of the Nook, the Apple i-pad comes into the market. This introduces not only an e-reader by Apple, but also internet and many other features. Just last month, my Nook gets a message about a software update, after I go through the update, my Nook now has internet browsing capability and room to upload music and pictures. This brought to my attention that the entire time this piece of equipment (my Nook) had the capability to have all these features, but it wasn’t put out onto the market until its competitors did so as well. This is a perfect example of strategic management. The innovation of the Nook “technology” was withheld until a PLANNED time for it to come out.

Another New product line that came into market that made me see the strategic planning behind it was the 4G Apple i-phone. Just when it seems like technology is at a point where it can’t get any better for a while; a problem is discovered with the phone. Since the internal antenna was built mainly around the sides of the phone one normally holds on to while having a conversation, there was a reception problem. One actually had to hold the phone vertically making it awkward to use. This is pushing an innovation in the 4G i-phone. Was this an accident? I don’t think so. I think it was purposefully done to be able to come out with another version or a “fixed version” faster. With all the cell phone technology that has been out, this seems like too much of a “dumb” mistake to make.