Strategy by Bottom-up Abstractions of the Customer Interface

Recently it has been suggested that marketing should reassert itself and reclaim its strategic role from the adjacent discipline of strategic management. This can be done by abstracting strategy from the customer interface by building a mental model of the key components of the customer interaction. To accomplish this undertaking, however, we need leaders, or managers, who are able to make holistic abstractions out of complex interactions. This paper has the aim to illustrate how market, or marketing, strategy empirically has been abstracted from customer interfaces by managers in six case studies by means of finding out, and building, either generic, or specific systems of different degrees of complexity. Generic systems may yield scale economy, which specific systems may not. It is suggested that more standardised systems are more strategic in nature.