"Big Picture Strategy " By Marta Dapena Baron

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to meet Marta Dapena Baron at the Ross BusinessSchool at the University of Michigan.

At the time she was working with ProfessorChristine Nordheilm teaching Strategic Marketing and consulting also at The BigPicture Partners.

When I met her, I was developing my teaching framework, which I later named Strategy inAction, and which broke with the different traditional frameworks in force atHarvard, since I increasingly felt that they were poorly adapted to what was used in companies. The way Harvard taught compartmentalized the different marketing variables into silos and described the marketing function as if it were a photograph, whereas I felt that the marketing function was not exercised by the same silos and felt should be more like a film than a photograph.

When I attended a session with Christine and Marta, I realized how much the model theyboth followed resembled the one I had in mind and used in class- The Strategy in Action Framework - differing essentially in the nomenclature used but not onthe principles. In several conversations, we tried to homogenize this nomenclature, and I adopted a lot of their terminology.

At the time, they versed their approach to Marketing Strategy in a book calledMarketing Management - The Big Picture, which I still recommend to my students today.

More recently, Marta Dapena Baron published a sequel to this book, now called BigPicture Strategy - The six choices that will transform your Business, which updates and completes the first book. It is a new way of approaching marketing strategy issues in the light of the 21st century, based on four Go To Market strategies, based on the concepts - Brands, Business Category, Bodies, Beliefs and Behaviors - which were already in evidence in the first book, but which have now been further developed. Both books are illuminating and worth reading.

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