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Introduction

What is business strategy you ask? There are four dimensions that define a business strategy: the product-market investment strategy, the customer value proposition, the assets and competencies and the functional strategies and programs. The first specifies where to compete and the remaining three indicate how to compete to win (Aaker, 2007).

The strategic planning process is very similar to how Aaker (2007) defined the four dimensions of a business strategy. In the strategic planning process there are four steps that define a business strategy; Strategy Initiation, Strategy Formulation, Strategy Implementation and Strategy Assessment (Turban, King, Lee, Liang & Turban, 2012). The initiation and parts of the formulation phase are similar to the “where to compete”-dimension and the rest is more similar to the “how to compete”-dimension (Own definition from Aaker, 2007 & Turban et al., 2012).

Aaker (2007) describes strategic market management as something that starts with Strategic analysis, which in turn gives us outputs that we use to create, adapt and implement strategy into your business. The strategic analysis is basically the same thing as the strategy initiation phase that Turban et al. (2012) presents as;

“In the strategy initiation phase, the organization examines itself and its environment. The principal activities include setting the organisation’s mission and goals, examining organizational strengths and weaknesses, assessing environmental factors impacting the business, and conducting a competitor analysis.”

The next two steps in the “strategic market management” is using the outputs from the strategic analysis and creating, adapting and implementing strategy into the organization. These steps are similar to the rest of the strategic planning process – formulation, implementation and assessment phases. These phases are described as following;

“Strategy formulation is the development of strategies to exploit opportunities...