Synthesis of: Sharma, S., (1999), Trespass or symbiosis? Dissolving the boundaries between strategic marketing and strategic management. Journal of St

Synthesis of: Sharma, S., (1999), Trespass or symbiosis? Dissolving the boundaries between strategic marketing and strategic management. Journal of Strategic Marketing, Volume 7, Issue 2, pp. 73–88.
The paper is and an expository text. It begins by tracing the decline in the importance of marketing strategy in competitive strategy. It then describes the emergence of strategic marketing as a more integrative discipline than marketing strategy, and the recent reapprochement in research ideas around competitiveness in strategic marketing and strategic management.
The objective of the article is to address the debate about the role of strategic marketing within the domain of firm competitive strategy.
The main argument of the paper is that shifting market boundaries, rapid technological change, shorter product lifecycles, and changing organizational forms have changed competitive rules and increased the complexity of business problems. These changes require a greater interdisciplinary approach and integration in teaching and research to reflect the practice of competitive strategy. This recognizes the importance of both an external focus based in market orientation and an internal focus on firm resources and capabilities.
The principle concepts introduced are strategic marketing and strategic management. Strategic marketing emerged in response to criticisms that marketing had failed to consider adequately the development of long-term competitive advantage. Strategic marketing involved a more judicious matching of a firm’s resources with environmental opportunities and constraints so as to achieve a long-run competitive advantage. Strategic management draws concepts such as segmentation, differentiation, positioning, life cycle analysis, product innovation, and product diffusion processes, from marketing strategy and packaging them for formulating business and corporate level competitive strategies.
The main ideas presented in the paper is that over the last few decades, several business developments have accelerated changes in market conditions and the rules of competition, pointing towards the need for greater integration of the different academic business disciplines. In addition, new organization forms are dissolving functional boundaries. Clear distinctions between firms and markets and between the company and its external environment are disappearing. Also, innovation has emerged as an important focus of competitive strategy research in both strategic management and strategic marketing. Strategic marketing with its emphasis on external innovation can complement with strategic management’s developments in internal innovations to research sustaining competitive advantage based on invisible assets and capabilities. The concept of market orientation with its notions of innovation, entrepreneurship, and organizational renewal and growth is an area with promise for strategic management.
The paper concludes that the new business realities of team building, close partnerships with customers, boundaryless organizations, organizational learning and adaptation, internal innovation, the need to manage alliances and co-operative networks, social responsiveness and ethics, indicate that multi-disciplinary research approaches and theoretical frameworks require multi-disciplinary teams of managers trained by multi-disciplinary teams of educators.
Opinion, Conclusions and Application
The paper outlines the trends in the business world where both the disciplines of strategic management and strategic marketing are merging as well as other disciplines in the business world. The conclusions are relevant because business professional should be aware of these trends to maintain competitive advantage and to create the appropriate teams of managers to take their businesses into the future or to obtain the correct education for their current team of managers.
We find that this is yet another phase in the business world and it changes from the divided disciplines of strategic management and strategic marketing to a more unified form to confront business objectives as they become unified. It also shows the increasing trend of complexity in the role of management and management teams.