The consumer journey is no longer a straight line; it’s a dynamic path across countless screens and platforms. For marketers, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. How do you avoid fragmenting your message across all the digital channels? Companies need skilled professionals who can respond to changing consumer patterns and are equipped to ensure optimal ROI) for marketing spend.

Sinan Aral, David Austin Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, explains how digital marketing channels can be integrated to provide a holistic consumer experience with higher click-through rates, conversion rates, and ROI.

What is integrated digital marketing?

Integrated digital marketing is a strategic approach that involves implementing, evaluating, and optimizing marketing initiatives across all channels within a digital marketing mix. This method aims to maximize audience reach and effectiveness, ultimately optimizing return on investment.¹

Companies can balance real-time investments with this strategy, reallocating marketing dollars off underperforming channels and onto overperforming ones immediately. In a siloed campaign, the spend has nowhere else to go.

Integrated marketing provides a holistic, seamless experience for the customer. Whether they interact with the brand on Instagram, through a Google search, or via an email newsletter, the messaging and look should be consistent. 

Every interaction reinforces the other and together, these channels become greater than the sum of their parts. 

MIT Sloan School of Management
Digital Business Strategy: Harnessing Our Digital Future

FAQs

How is integrated digital marketing different from IMC?

Integrated digital marketing is a subset of integrated marketing communications (IMC), which involves aligning on all communication channels for a single message. This includes digital channels, like social media and video platforms, and traditional media such as print and event marketing.²

Is a digital marketing course worth it?

A digital marketing course can be worthwhile for marketing professionals, whether they are new to the field or have experience already, that want to harness the potential of their online audiences. Students can build on their foundational knowledge of digital marketing and explore topics like search engine optimization, website design, and social media marketing.

Is marketing mix still relevant today?

A marketing mix is the set of focus areas for a comprehensive marketing plan, sometimes called the four Ps: product, price, placement, and promotion. Instead of focusing on a single message, an effective marketing strategy balances addressing all four. How do integrated marketing play a role in the marketing mix? An integrated marketing campaign coordinates these messages across all channels.³

What is an example of integrated digital marketing?

One example of an integrated digital marketing campaign is coordinating web and mobile advertising, as opposed to web or mobile-only. This multi-touchpoint experience for users can improve click-through rates.

Transcript

Consumers live, work, and play across multiple channels and across multiple devices. So to communicate with them effectively, marketers must employ all of the different marketing channels in concert to go where the consumers are and to provide a seamless experience that fits into their lives.

Integrated digital marketing is a strategy designed to implement, assess, and optimize marketing efforts across all of the channels in a digital marketing mix. Integrated digital marketing allows you to reach the largest audience possible in the most effective manner possible in a way that optimizes return on investment.

The benefits of integrated digital marketing come from two sources. The first is balancing investments in real time. And the second is harnessing complementarities across channels. 

Balancing allows you to measure the effectiveness of ad dollars spent across all different channels, and to adjust the investments and the real-time spend across those channels based on how they’re performing.

If one channel is underperforming while another is performing better than expected, ad dollars can be reallocated from the underperforming channel to the overperforming channel in order to optimize return on the marketing dollar. This cuts wasteful ad dollars, while putting marketing investments to work on channels and campaigns that have a solid return.

The marketing channels don’t work in isolation, but rather as a unit guiding communication with consumers in a holistic manner with a 360-degree view of their needs, concerns, interests, and affinities. The use of one channel can integrate with and improve the functioning, and thus the returns, to another channel.

Let me give you some examples of this type of integration. Take, for instance, the interaction between display advertising and search advertising. How does display advertising affect the effectiveness of search advertising, and vice versa? Nearly a fifth of all search conversions have seen a digital display ad.

And experiments show that users exposed to a display ad conduct five to 25 percent more campaign-relevant searches. Display ads also increase search conversion and search clicks, which also increase search ad costs. A dollar invested in search and display together returns a dollar 24 for display and a dollar 75 for search.

This has been shown in experiments that have been randomized, so the causal relationships have been shown to be true. In addition to channels, cross media ad exposures can increase clicks and conversions. Take, for instance, online display ads and mobile display ads. Experiments have shown that for web click-through rates, web-only versus web and mobile advertising shows a clear advantage to the integration of web and mobile advertising together, garnering a 34 percent higher click-through rate on web channels. In addition, on mobile channels, the web and mobile advertising combination outperforms the mobile-only combination by 23 percent in experiments on mobile ad channels for the click-through rate. The story for conversions is very similar: web and mobile ads integrated together return a 34 percent higher conversion rate in experiments compared to mobile-only advertising to the same consumer. 

Integrated digital marketing also enables the marketer to avoid substitution. For instance, experiments have shown that web and mobile ads together reduce the conversion rate on the mobile device by 16 percent, compared to mobile-only ads. Which indicates that web ads could distract from consumers trying to purchase on the mobile phone. Understanding these complex complementarities and substitution effects is an important part of integrated digital marketing, and the benefits to an integrated digital channel mix.

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The accelerated use and integration of applications, algorithms, software, and smartphones is revolutionising how brands reach and engage with hyper-connected audiences. However, L’Oréal Professor of Marketing and Associate Dean of Research at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Andrew Stephen, cautions brands against letting the technology drive the solutions. 

Transcript

What are we talking about when we, when we refer to this thing called marketing technology? So really, it encompasses pretty much anything, from technology being used in marketing. So software, applications, algorithms, overall programs and platforms, the hardware, fast computer processes, increased resolution, you know, smartphones themselves, things like interactive billboards even could be considered within marketing technology. And then all the services wrapped around that. So not just sort of software as a service type concepts, but also consulting, implementation, project management, systems integration, you name it, sort of all the IT world type services being brought into particular marketing applications.

So how do we bring this into the context of, of marketing practice?

So, really the world these days is governed by algorithms and we can automate a lot. And then in marketing, we see tons of marketing automation driven by algorithms. There’s a lot of automation that happens now in marketing, and that’s really one of the big things that marketing technology has provided.

And it’s really, actually, at the end of the day, there to help better serve hyper-connected customers. So if we think about algorithms in marketing and automation in marketing, which are powered by algorithms, from a customer perspective, they’re really there to help marketers better reach and engage with customers, find the right customers in a complex landscape where, let’s say on Facebook, an individual user on Facebook might be defined by literally thousands of characteristics. There’s no way in the world a marketer could manually decide how to target ads at a person on the basis of that many variables. So of course we need algorithms.

Of course, we need some, some level of automation to help marketers actually effectively and efficiently reach and engage with customers. 

Just because there is a solution, just because, you know, there is a tech service you could buy or lease does not mean that there’s a problem that needs to be solved. So I think putting the cart before the horse, or sort of the tech solution before the problem, is obviously not the way we should do it, but it happens all the time.

And of course marketing technology companies are going to tell you they’ve got the best solution to whatever problem or set of problems. But don’t let them drive your solution-finding. Think about what your problems are, and then go out and find the solutions from marketing technology to help you.

But it’s a really exciting space. And I think it’s one that professional marketers nowadays, and into the future, really need to be up on because there’s a lot of innovation happening in marketing technology. 

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Algorithms and AI play an increasingly influential role in how we experience the world, the decisions we make, and our perception of reality. So how can marketers ensure that they’re using this technology responsibly?

Transcript

I think it’s actually quite difficult to go through the day, any day, without having a machine curate what you see and mediate your experience with the world around you. We’re already at a point where what we choose to eat, who we choose to date, how we drive, and what directions we take are being affected and mediated by technology.

I think what’s important about that though, is that that increase in spread is also being accompanied by a decrease in the consciousness around the fact that this is happening. So it’s become so natural for us to have algorithms and artificial intelligence curating our world. And for us to seek information through these means that we kind of can go on autopilot – it’s so comfortable. So I think as we look to the future, the question becomes not just spread, it becomes whether we even notice it at all.

This filtering and this ability to see the world through the eyes of what the machine has decided is best for you to see is, is the way in which we’re kind of experiencing reality right now. We know from behavioral science that humans, although brilliant, tend to be cognitively miserly.

If it’s too hard to think about, we’ll go with something easier. And that becomes the area in which this influence is really changing the way in which we view our worlds. For me, when I think about social media, I think about the fact that I have family members all over the Earth. And the news that they’re reading about what’s going on in one country, uh, colors their view, not only of that country, but of what my experience is, the kinds of conversations we have, what they think is important to me. And so there’s a path dependency that happens due to this intervention that wouldn’t have happened before. At the same time, I’ve been able to, to plan a family reunion via social media, right? So we have this, we have this, uh, dynamic that is tremendously powerful in positive ways, but also is changing the way in which we interact with each other and not always in good ways.

I think, systematically, we need to think about the processes. So these algorithms ostensibly, are meant to improve our decision making, right? To help us be our better selves. And so I think as organizations create these processes that are algorithmically mediated, the first systematic question is: a) Should we do it? Should we? Should we have an algorithm or machine learning making the decisions with us at this point?

The second question, I think we should ask, is to what degree is this being designed with humans in mind? 

And that’s really important because humans are fallible, have biases, and may rely on algorithms to rationalize decisions that otherwise they’d have to explain themselves.

In other words, if we have biases in algorithms and machine learning, and that supports our own biases, we may feel more robust in the flawed conclusions that we make. And so, I think a really important question is how does this interact with the tendencies of human beings to be cognitively miserly, but also to want to be shown that the way they think is right, to not want to be challenged?

The post The Power of Algorithms appeared first on GetSmarter Blog.

Transcript

As mobile has become more integrated into our lives, consumer expectations have changed significantly. Consumers now expect firms to anticipate their needs and satisfy them in a personalized and context-specific way when they want, where they want. Every time the customer pulls out a mobile phone to solve a problem along their customer journey, there is a mobile moment, and they expect some firm to help them solve that problem. The competition for customers now increasingly occurs in these mobile moments. Whichever firm helps the customers to move along their journey, with the least friction, wins. This means that firms must design consumer experiences around mobile moments and mobile journeys.

With mobile, marketers can now easily offer targeted messages to customers based on their location. The two most common practices are: one, geo-fencing, where a firm sends targeted messages to customers near its location in order to defend the people close to you; and two, geo-conquesting, where the firm sends targeted messages to a customer who’s near a competitor with the intent of poaching that competitor’s customer. For example, when a coffee chain sends you a discount when you’re right next to it, that is geo-fencing. But when it sends you a coupon when you’re next to a competitor, that would be geo-conquesting.

Of course, marketers know more than location. They also know the time, which can improve targeting. For example, suppose you’re near a cafe and a pub on a Friday afternoon at 2p.m. A message from a cafe for coffee would be more effective at this time. But when it is 8p.m., a message from the pub would be more effective.

Let’s consider a banking example. Using location data, some banks are now able to offer loans to customers who have installed their app on their cell phone. As soon as they notice that the customer has spent a lot of time in a car dealership or around a home that is for sale, the bank knows that anyone who spends time in a car dealership or near a home for sale for an extended period is probably looking for a car loan or a home mortgage.

The bank then integrates this information with data from the cloud about the person’s credit history, and is able to assess whether the person is a good credit risk. It’s then able to make a loan offer automatically in real time. The bank completely eliminated the loan application process, the time for underwriting, etc., and significantly reduced any of the unnecessary frictions in the customer journey.

Because, after all, consumers only want a loan, nobody wants to go to a bank or fill a form, etc. Those are purely frictions in the journey. You can imagine that this bank would easily win against the competition in the mobile moment against any bank that requires you to visit it. This kind of digital, mobile-driven innovation is completely disrupting traditional banking as branches are now being seen more as a friction than as a source of customer value in the customer’s journey. 

Mobile has two distinguishing characteristics that differentiate it from desktops: it’s location aware and it is portable. These two characteristics, combined with time, weather, and other data that you could partner with other firms, have significantly enhanced the ability of firms to perform contextual targeting that reduce frictions in the customer journey.

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We live in an era of disruption in which innovation and technology have transformed the way we live and work at an unprecedented rate. In order to remain relevant, marketers need to leverage emerging technologies to meet changing consumer behaviours, improve engagement, and achieve data-driven impact. One of these technologies is precision targeting. L’Oréal Professor of Marketing and Associate Dean of Research at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, Andrew Stephen, explains how a brand can use precision targeting to navigate social media algorithms effectively and deliver its message to the right audience.

Transcript

The purpose of precision targeting is to get the right content seen by the right people. You want to get your content messages, ads, and so on in front of the right people, those likely to want to engage with it, and hopefully, who are the most likely to purchase or do something else that’s commercially valuable to your business in response to that advertisement. This is why precision targeting is important.

So let’s use the analogy of a dartboard – placing ads on a social media site with two and a half million users is likely to be as accurate as playing darts blindfolded. Where your ads end up and who they’re seen by is really going to be out of your control, determined by algorithms, and is not very likely to reach the audiences who would be interested in your ad.

Now consider the data available on consumers, such as age, location, gender, relationship, languages, education, work, their hobbies, and interests, and so on, and so on, and so on. The opportunity that precision targeting presents, being able to target audiences who would find your ads most appealing and relevant, therefore can be built off this technology that, that knows something about people. Targeting can therefore be really broad, as something like potential customers who live in a certain country or state. Or, if you desire, you can get as specific as potential customers who live in a certain country, currently university students, have shown interest in your brand on another platform, and so on. So let’s have an example. Consider the potential that this all presents for a company that offers live acoustic bands for weddings.

So, using precision targeting, what would this company be able to do? Well, they’d be able to narrow down potential consumers who live in the city – where they’re based – who currently identify as being in a relationship on social media, uh, and who have liked or followed groups associated with that type of music, so live acoustic music. And so that when someone’s relationship status changes to engaged, that’s the trigger. Um, they could use precision targeting to really show a targeted advertisement at people who are therefore most likely to want the services offered by this company. So they can really get on the radar of the consumer who’s planning a wedding. 

The only thing to be mindful of with precision targeting though, is it can get too far. So you can, you can go too far and veer into what I call creepy territory, where you’re even risking the perception that you’re invading the privacy of potential customers. So the best practice is to narrow down your targeting, but not to be so narrow that it could feel invasive or creepy in any way that feels like a breach of privacy. The other practical reason for not going too narrow is, at the end of the day, you do need some volume in your business. So, so narrowing it down to target just one person is probably, most of the time, not going to be enough customers to sustain the business. So you do need some mass reach in there, but it doesn’t have to be the whole universe.

I hope these visual analogies made the concepts of precision targeting and programmatic advertising more real and relatable.

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How and when brands interact with their customers has changed significantly in recent years. Frank Dudley, a lecturer at Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, explains how a dynamic marketing approach drives engagement at every touchpoint, using various channels, and at every stage in the consumer journey.

Transcript

During most of the first decade of the 21st century, we have seen the evolution of digital marketing in terms of channels, including social media, mobile apps, et cetera. However, up until about 2015, almost all digital marketing was still primarily direct marketing over the internet, and was added to marketing services, as it was perceived as one of the many ‘below the line’ marketing functions.

Since 2015, we have been in the era of dynamic marketing, in which digital is no longer a functional below the line area in marketing. In the era of dynamic marketing, all marketing is digital, or digitally enabled, and is driven by customer data and technology. Brands are no longer primarily built through TV advertising alone, but through ongoing customer engagement that can be viewed, shared, reviewed, tracked, and optimized in real time.

We have entered a new age of marketing, whereby customer engagement is driven across multiple channels and various stages of a customer journey for specific segments of customers. There are sometimes multiple customer touch points within several media channels for just one stage of the customer journey.

For example, when in the consideration stage of the journey, you might search on Google, read recommendations on Amazon, Yelp or the company’s website; and seek input from others through social media, such as Facebook or Instagram. Dynamic marketing is a truly new and exciting form of marketing that leverages customer data, both structured and unstructured, to respond to, or anticipate, customer needs within a particular circumstance and with the most relevant content and via the most preferred channel  to fulfill those needs. This enables real-time interaction with customers on a more personalized basis. Unlike the traditional static approaches to marketing that primarily rely upon stimuli to elicit a response from a prospect or customer, a dynamic approach to marketing is much more interactive and fluid. It’s always on.

It’s important for marketing customer experience leaders to understand where a customer is in their journey with the brand and how to trigger the next best action to drive the customer to the next stage in the journey. Today, companies such as Salesforce, Adobe and Microsoft are enabling dynamic interaction with customers and prospects in new and innovative ways.

The post What Is Dynamic Marketing? appeared first on GetSmarter Blog.

Before digital marketing, an unhappy customer might have told six friends about their experience. After digital marketing? That unhappy customer could tell over 6,000 people. Insights like these are why it’s so important to debunk myths related to digital marketing, and instead focus on effective and measurable strategies that create the most value for your customers.

Transcript

Oftentimes, people have some misconception about digital marketing.

For example, on one extreme, people think digital marketing is totally different from the traditional offline strategy. On the other hand, the other extreme views think that no, no, no, no, the digital marketing is just a simple extension of a conventional marketing strategy – so just happening on the internet. So both views are not quite right. We will revisit those misconceptions and try to address them.

The most common misconception is that digital marketing’s only aim is to sell. It is not about selling a product or service, but more about creating the value by meeting what customer needs and wants. Once a firm creates a value for their target customer then they are entitled to capture some portion of the value they created, which is the capturing the value.

Think about how to create the value. There are several ways, even without selling a product. Built on the digitalization and big data, companies now can create a value by customizing the shopper’s experience. In other words, firms can analyze customers’ behavior and tailor its next interaction accordingly. By doing that, even without directly urging them to buy the product all the time, the value added to content or digital activity will translate into brand loyalty and, ultimately, sales.

Digital marketing is new marketing, totally different from offline marketing. No, it is still part of a firm’s overall strategy. The basic principles are the same.

You should convey the message to the right audience, and this message about how you create value for your customer should be the same, whether it’s online or offline. Both online/offline can be used for both brand building and the direct response, such as customer attraction or increasing sales. So, the bottom line is that digital marketing is still marketing. The big difference, however, is in the details.

Digital marketing is a mere extension of conventional marketing, just on the internet. No, it is not just a simple extension of conventional marketing. It is still new phenomenon. It has its own tools, approaches, which are not available to the conventional setting. We have to recognize the power from the unique set of digital levers. Those digital levers allow more integrated and context-relevant interaction with the customer.

They also provide greater measurability of marketing activities, which is not possible in offline marketing. So now, in digital marketing, we have an exact ROI of our particular marketing activities.

This use of social media and viral marketing has a different scale of effects. Think about it: If you make a customer unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make a customer unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000. So, the scale we are talking about is completely different. The effects of this viral marketing are huge.

Online and offline marketing, they are both part of a firm’s marketing strategy, but not just a simple extension of conventional marketing; there are so many new things that’s possible and only in digital marketing.

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When considering the fact that network effects play a significant role in strategic action and success in digital markets, it’s clear that cultivating and promoting it needs to be a key component of any social media strategy.

Transcript

Network effects are a powerful driver of strategic action and success in digital markets. When the value of a product, service, platform or message is amplified by the number of other people who consume or participate in it, value can multiply very quickly as more people join in. So, cultivating and promoting network effects is a key component of social media strategy.

So, how can we build and cultivate network effects and especially local network effects? Several strategies can be quite useful. First is to pursue go-to-market strategies that activate tight-knit clusters of connected groups by giving them, for instance, incentives to groups to join together or encouraging new members or consumers to invite their trusted friends or peers or family to the group. A second strategy is to build and cultivate tight-knit community, which means to encourage interaction and exchange and engagement in the community to motivate people to share and build together, building their profiles or creating common user-generated content or experiences. Another important strategy is to encourage creation – content and otherwise – because the content and community that is contributed by members or users or consumers is what creates the value for other people.

Think what about commenting sections in a publisher’s website or, think about a community or a bulletin board that doesn’t have any posts. It’s the posts that bring value to the other community members; it’s the conversation, it’s the art that’s created or the exchange that’s created. It’s also important to analyze which groups and interactions are creating the most engagement and encouraging those types of consumers to join more and more often, and encouraging those types of interactions and engagements to happen more often. Some of the most rabid communities, for example, crop up around sports teams or around common interests or around common causes. The commonality, and also the clustering or the tight-knitness of these groups, is part and parcel of creating this extra engagement and therefore cultivating local network effects and value. One way to do that is to focus on creating common goals and/or norms in the community. And another example would be to encourage social proof; to encourage people leaving ratings, or reviews, or positive social feedback. Because this encourages members of the community to post and contribute more, and provides value to the community in assessing which types of content are useful for that community to engage with and get value from.

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These days, businesses need more than just a Facebook page or an app if they want to stay ahead of competitors. According to Jeanne Ross, Faculty Director in the Organizational Design for Digital Transformation online short course from the MIT Sloan School of Management (MIT Sloan), innovation is key — and that means embracing digital technologies, and their resulting capabilities, to improve your value proposition.

Transcript

If it feels like the pace of change in business is accelerating, it’s because it is. Let me tell you why.

We are being bombarded by new digital technologies. It started with social, mobile, analytics, cloud, Internet of Things. I call these “SMACIT,” because that’s the way it feels. We’re being smacked around by these new technologies. And, of course, it doesn’t stop there. Now we have artificial intelligence, blockchain, biometrics, robotics. They just keep coming, and they are changing the competitive landscape.

What’s interesting to us as we study these technologies, is that if we only look at one of them, it’s no big deal. You can do a little social media or add an app to your customer interface, and it doesn’t fundamentally change your business. It perhaps makes things a little bit more interesting. It enhances the customer experience.

What’s amazing about these technologies is how they change the value proposition. These digital technologies are introducing three rather remarkable business capabilities.

The first is ubiquitous data. Basically, we can know anything that we want to know. It’s changed our personal lives in so many ways to have ubiquitous data. It’s only starting to change our business lives, but that impact is going to become greater and greater.

And teamed with that is the second capability: unlimited connectivity. So, once we know something, we can share it. We can do something about it. We can respond to a new customer need.

And then add to that massive processing power. What that means is we can know anything, we can share that information, and there’s no limit, really, to how much we can process. So, what it does is it changes the way we think about what we can do for our customer.

Think about Uber. That company emerged because it recognized that taxis did a fine job of getting people from A to B, but it didn’t tell people when they’d be picked up, how much it would cost, when they’d get delivered, what the name of their driver is. So, it turns out that because they could, customers went: “Wow. That is so much better than just a ride in a taxi.” It is a transportation solution.

The problem is if we are established businesses, we can’t always imagine these. I mean, the taxi companies could have added these very same capabilities, but they didn’t. They didn’t know how. They didn’t know it was important. They just couldn’t imagine it. Basically, they waited until their customers had been seized by other companies, and then they started saying, “We better do something about this.” And they actually weren’t positioned to do it.

This could happen to any company, in any industry. It is a matter of somebody else, a start-up, a competitor, a digital technology company saying, “There’s so much more you could be doing for your customers than you are.” There are brand-new value propositions.

The post Why Technology Is Changing Business: The Three Digital Capabilities appeared first on GetSmarter Blog.

Transcript

Now when addressing the question, what is strategy? I’m not going to give you one answer. I’m going to give you four.

Traditionally, and probably what you’ve been most exposed to in your career thus far, is the idea of strategy as the four Ps. What do we mean by the four Ps? Strategy is first and foremost a plan. It’s, “what are we trying to accomplish? What is our strategic goal?” Number two, strategy as a pattern, it’s a pattern of behavior. In many ways it’s the roadmap. We have a plan which comes with a strategic goal. Now the pattern of strategy is, “how are we going to get there?” But that’s not it for strategy. Strategy also has a third P which is strategy as a position. Position means, where am I going to operate? Where am I going to compete? What does that mean? What markets am I going to operate in? What segments? What geographies? What customers am I going to serve? And importantly, what customers am I not going to serve? 

So, there’s three right there: strategy as a plan, a goal; strategy as a pattern, a set of behaviors or our roadmap to get to that goal; and strategy as a position, where are we going to play? Now the fourth P, in many ways, is the most exciting, but it’s also the most abstract: strategy as a perspective. What do we mean by perspective? A perspective is a way of understanding the world around us, the world around us, when we’re organizational leaders and managers is in at least two forms, there’s the organizational world around us and there’s the market or competitive world around us.

We have theories and assumptions about both of those. We have assumptions about the way our competitive environments are going to operate. And we have assumptions about what are the resources and capabilities we have within our organizational context. We have a theory about what it will take to create competitive advantage using what we have in the context in which we’re operating.

Now, I know that’s abstract, but it’s important to realize that. What is your theory of competitive advantage within your organization and within your competitive environment?

Thinking about strategy

Now that’s the most traditional, but also in many ways, one of the most useful ways to think about strategy. It articulates exactly what are the elements, what are the parameters, by which I should be thinking about strategy, a goal, a system of behavior, a position and then undergirding all of that is a theory, a perspective about what I have and what is available to me.

Creating a competitive advantage in business requires strategy, which can be broken down into four Ps: Plan, Pattern, Position, and Perspective. Once you have those parameters down, you also have a road map to accomplishing your business goals. 

Learn more about the four Ps of strategy with the late Edward Smith who, before his sad passing, was the Faculty Director in the Strategic Change Management online program from Kellogg Executive Education at Northwestern University.

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