A Study on Marketing Strategic Types and Performance in the Korea Apparel Firms

The purpose of this study is to empirically ascertain how the fitness between marketing strategy each firm chooses and environment facing each firm affects the performance of firms measured by the growth rate of market share and the growth rate of profit/sales ratio. In doing so, firms are divided into three groups. With regard to the marketing strategy, firms are classified into three groups based on marketing strategy type; prospector, analyzer, and defender. The main result of this study are as follows: First, responding firms are classified into prospector, analyzer, and defender following Miles & Snow's marketing strategy types. This classification is made using a self typing method and further confirmed by a factor analysis using a number of variables relating marketing objectives and marketing mix. Second, the results show that there are significant differences across marketing strategies in the performance measures of the growth rate of market share and profit/sales ratio. It seems, however, that there is no straight forward relationship between the marketing strategy and the performance measures. This strongly implies that the type of marketing strategy to be adopted by each firm should depend on the environment facing each firm. Third, the result indicates that the growth rate of market share tends to depend only on the marketing strategy type regardless of sufficiency and variation of environment, but profit/sales ratio tends to depend on the fitness between marketing strategy type and environment. It implies that a firm should adopt different marketing strategies for different environment characteristics, in order to enhance the efficiency of resources used reflected in the profit/sales ratio.