The application of market share objectives in directing, planning and monitoring marketing activity at corporate, divisional and brand levels

Abstract

The main criterion of measuring the success of a marketing oriented company is the market share that it can achieve over its competitive rivals. The main objective of this study is to investigate the application of market share in the direction and control of the marketing activity for a brand or a product. To understand such applications.it is therefore necessary to consider the managerial use of this objective in the strategy formulation and control function at different managerial levels of an organisation. The differences of objectives, responsibilities, and type of decisions undertaken by managers at various levels require different definitions of a product's market. A higher level of market aggregation can be expected to take place at the higher managerial level to match the longer time span of the decision, and a greater responsibility. At the other end, segmenting the market by different criteria implies identifying these segments employed for measuring the share level of product. In addition, the constraints of a company's ultimate long term objective (Rol) over strategy formulation may affect the level of commitment of various marketing managers towards market share objective. A larger market share may not always produce higher profitability, and the product life cycle concept is used to identify conditions under which different results may be obtained. Finally, the study investigates the effects of factors "such as product characteristics and inflation rates on a manager's choice in selecting the marketing sales figure (sales value, or volume) for assessing the share level of a product. All the above factors generate the study hypotheses that will be tested by the postal questionnaire approach. The product/brand managers of heavily advertised fast moving consumer goods or of durable consumer products marketed by British or foreign companies in ttie UK market, will be surveyed. Since the collected data will tnko a number of forms, both non-parametric statistics, such as chi-square test, and mrametric statistics, such as Student's t-test, will be used for the purpose of analysis. In addition, to test the practical application and validity of the study findings, some of the senior marketing managers who responded to the questionnaire survey will be interviewed.