Abstract
This chapter aims to summarize several years of research around strategic concepts and models that are useful for any organization. It starts with the study of the environment related to smart city development. In this turbulent context, organizations must survive and be robust, creating products with broader value based on a market-oriented approach to be successful. These products (goods, services, ideas, experiences, information) should be a solution to human needs and wants, accessible, enhanced, and inclusive. Organizations should be able to overcome marketing problems and undertake their production and delivery, fulfilling the entrepreneur's vision. Thus, strategic planning helps to guide the organization toward its goals and objectives through an inclusive and sustainable entrepreneurial marketing strategy. Finally, organizational products and activities are expected to contribute to societal sustainability.
TopIntroduction
The purpose of this chapter is to present several theoretical and practical models developed by the author that can help any entrepreneur or manager cope with different strategical topics crucial for the organization’s success. In the literature, theoretical frameworks that include all the aspects presented in this book chapter using the well-known and strategic chess game are rare.
Organizations should assess the territories where they want to operate to determine the available resources, customers, and environmental comfort for their human collaborators. This aspect is related to societal sustainability, and both consider crucial for organizations. Organizational toughness and strategic planning are part of the organizational dynamics to face uncertain and turbulent environments. In this context, market orientation and entrepreneurial marketing are the managerial ideology that frames strategic behaviours to succeed in the market. A new model (vowel model) represents entrepreneurs’ challenges, and at the core is the tetrad-value theory, to explains one of the main ways to create value for the customers.
This chapter presents the chess game pieces representing several management models (Figure 1). Other authors have made similar analogies (e.g., Genkin et al., 2019; Harris, 2009; Jorge-Moreno, 2020). It is a way of showing their importance in competitive markets, each with its operational capacity and, as a whole, effective in helping entrepreneurs and managers succeed. An entrepreneur must have purposes, and dynamics to achieve them, creating an adjusted and flexible organizational culture that materializes their business ideology and faces their business challenges to provide a value proposition desired by the market.
Figure 1. Source: author design It begins with the theoretical framework around the territory habitat where organizations are established. Organizations aim to create, produce and distribute products, which are the designation for goods, services, ideas, experiences, or information, to facilitate their mention in the text. These products, to have demand, should satisfy the needs and wants of the potential customers. Again, this word is used to represent consumers, clients, or prescribers to facilitate their mention in the text. As such, customer satisfaction is achieved if the organizations are market-oriented and the products are accessible, enhanced, and inclusive, overcoming all the problems to be their production undertakable. Consequently, entrepreneurs should plan their moves to implement inclusive and sustainable entrepreneurial marketing to achieve societal sustainability, which includes economic, social, ecological, and psychological dimensions.
Many studies and the academic and professional experience of the author for more than 40 years support the models presented.
Another essential characteristic of this chapter is its multi and transdisciplinary approach, crossing several scientific domains (e.g., economics, strategic management, human resources management, marketing, sociology, psychology, etc.).
Thus, this chapter is divided, after this introduction, into a background section, where the models are presented and defined, a conclusion, references, and key terms and definitions.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Marketing: Science that studies, in the different environmental contexts of markets, how transactional relationships are created, maintained or developed, internally and externally, through which the stakeholders seek to satisfy their needs and desires.
Economic Value: The ability of the product (good, service, idea, experience, information) to meet the human needs of the customers, as well as to create financial or non-financial income for its producer and/or supplier.
Shared Value: It benefits others in addition to those who created it.
Innovation: The creation of a new viable product, process, or business model.
Multiple Values: Involves economic, ecological, social, and psychological value (tetrad-value theory).
Values: The behaviors an organization will defend and sponsor, internally and externally.
Societal Sustainability: The result of the complementarity between economic and financial viability, ecological stewardess and preservation, social equity, and people’s psychological balance.
Market Orientation: Planning and implementing activities or creating products (goods, services, ideas, experiences, information) that meet the needs and wishes, present and latent, of all stakeholders involved in transactional relationships in the target markets.
Marketing Management: Analyzing the internal and external environment, supply, demand and stakeholders concerning existing and latent human needs and desires, preparing strategic and operational responses based on available resources that allow the creation, maintenance and development of transactional relationships, aiming to satisfy the stakeholders at the individual, organizational and social levels.
Ecological Value: The ability of the product (good, service, idea, experience, information) to contribute to the preservation of natural capital (environment, planet, or biodiversity).
Ecological Sustainability: Conservation of natural resources, environment, and biodiversity.
Mission: A short and motivating proposition for the employees, which should describe the reason for the organization's existence based on the vision and core values.
Psychological Sustainability: Mental well-being manifested by healthy behaviors and feelings of fulfilment and happiness.
Vision: Expressed in a statement that can mention the story, the values that rule organization, and its future goals.
Quality: The satisfaction of customer requirements through a set of product features and attributes.
Stakeholders: Any individuals or groups that may affect organizational performance or who are affected by the achievement of the organization's objectives.
Strategic Planning: A process of setting goals, objectives, and strategies in the medium and long term, based on the analysis of all the information about the market, the stakeholders, the resources, capabilities and competencies of the organization, and environmental trends.
Business model: A conceptual, strategic, and operational tool that describes the value proposition offered to the stakeholders through a product (good, service, idea, experience, information), including segmentation, targeting, positioning, price, distribution, communication, people, partners, processes, and purposes, aiming at to achieve societal sustainability.
Organizational learning: The process of creating a knowledge capital, implying a constant challenge to the practices and beliefs of the organization, reflected in an attitude of open-mindedness, formal and informal commitment in learning and training, a shared vision about its mission, and in information search, experimentation, and innovation behaviors, allowing to improve individual and collective performances.
FAMOUS: An acronym that describes the main features of strategic planning: Flexible, All-embrace, Market-Oriented, Usable, and Sustainable.
Entrepreneurship: Creating something (product, project), mostly through an organization, to serve and satisfy human wants and needs.
Social Sustainability: Preservation of social cohesion in terms of social well-being, nutrition, shelter, health, education, safety, justice, social equity, quality of life, etc.
Sales Orientation: It is considered that the primary key to the success of the organization is based on persuading potential customers to adhere to the products through advertising, personal persuasion, or other means.
Social Value: The product’s ability to positively impact the community (social welfare, nutrition, shelter, health, safety, social equity, or quality of life.
Organizational Plasticity: An organization's ability to change irreversible and permanently its strategic approach to the markets in order to survive and/or grow (resilience) under different conditions (adaptability) and environmental (flexibility) pressures and be able to timely and effectively (agility) react to threats and seize opportunities proactively.
Psychological Value: The ability of the product (good, service, idea, experience, information) to influence or transform some individuals’ lives, mentalities, knowledge, skills, or behaviors.
SWOT-GO: A management tool that summarizes all data from business intelligence in terms of strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities and points out goals and objectives for each piece of information on the table, allowing a list from where will be chosen the main goals and objectives for each strategic planning period.
Normative-Legal Orientation: It is considered that the primary key to the organization’s success is to protect its value propositions through individual or associative pressure on regulatory bodies to change or influence the rules and policies that govern the behavior/product at stake.
Organizational Strength: An organization’s ability to access, internally and externally, physical, human, intellectual and financial resources.
Economic Sustainability: Financial equilibrium through efficient use of resources, providing products (goods, services, ideas, experience, information) that satisfy the customers and other stakeholders, with a sufficient return to meet all financial commitments.
Product Orientation: It is considered that the primary key to the success of the organization is to provide enhanced products at a monetary and non-monetary reasonable cost. If possible, offers should be continually improved.
Organizational Toughness: An organization's ability to internalize market impacts or other events (natural disasters, pandemics, strikes) and to withstand shocks through a plastic adaptation that avoids failures or ruptures, i.e., a combination of organizational plasticity and strength.
Market Segmentation: Dividing global demand into a small number of groups sufficiently homogeneous in terms of behavior, needs, and motivations and sufficiently heterogeneous to each other to justify differentiated marketing policies.
Production Orientation: It is considered that the primary key to the success of the organization is to provide products in quantity, using more efficient processes that make supply more available to meet demand. If possible, services should be standardized to keep their monetary and non-monetary costs.
Transactional Relationship: Implies the exchange of tangible or intangible values over time, ranging from punctual exchanges to long-term exchanges involving personal relationship.