Brian David Smith

Brian David Smith PhD, BSc (Hons), FCIM, is a Chartered Marketer and an academic researcher, author and advisor in the area of strategic management. His work mostly concerns how firms create and implement competitive strategies in practice.

Brian David Smith was born in Hebburn in 1963. Smith's first degree was in Chemistry from Newcastle University (1983). He then spent 5 years working as a research chemist and a further 15 years in marketing management with large pharmaceutical and medical technology companies. He became a qualified marketer in 1989 and served as the first non-academic examiner for the Chartered Institute of Marketing. In 2003, he gained his PhD from Cranfield School of Management. His thesis, supervised by Professor Malcolm McDonald, was entitled The Effectiveness of Strategy Making Processes in Medical Markets.

He is Visiting Research Fellow in the Marketing and Strategy Research Unit of the Open University Business School, Europe's largest business school, and was formerly a researcher at the Cranfield University School of Management.

As an author, he has written more than 200 papers, articles and books. These include three major books. Smith is also the editor of the Journal of Medical Marketing, a peer-reviewed journal.

As an advisor, he works mostly in the pharmaceutical and medical technology sectors, in which he spent his management career. He has worked with most of the major companies and many smaller ones in this industry.

He is heavily involved in the Chartered Institute of Marketing. A former International Vice Chair, he became a Fellow of the CIM in 1999. He now chairs the CIM's Levitt Group and serves on the committee of the Medical Marketing Group.

Current research

Smith's current research focus is on strategy implementation and the reasons why firms fail to implement the strategies they develop. His work into strategy making processes seeks to understand why firms make weak strategies.

Research foundation

Smith's research brings together various streams of previous research by others in the field.

• Research by Henry Mintzberg and others into the hybrid processes (planning, vision, incrementalism) that firms use to create strategy.
• Research into how different processes fit with different levels of market complexity and turbulence.
• Research into how internal factors such as company culture help or hinder strategic planning.
• Burrell and Morgan's congruency hypothesis.

Research contributions

Contributions made by Smith to this field of research include:

• The What Works is What Fits conclusion, leading to Smith's recommendation that companies should not copy so-called 'best practice', but instead craft hybrid strategy making processes that fit their unique combination of market conditions and organisational culture. This research is covered in Smith's first book, Making Marketing Happen.
• Clarification of what 'strong strategy' looks like and how it differs from weak strategy. Smith's work develops a series of tests for the resource allocation choices made by firms and relates them to whether the strategy will destroy or create shareholder value. This work is explained in Smith's second book, co-written with Professor Malcolm McDonald and Professor Keith Ward, Marketing Due Diligence.

Smith's work into market insight seeks to unravel the process by which firms translate data into information, information into knowledge, knowledge into insight and insight into value.

This work was co-developed with Dr Paul Raspin [1] (PhD, Cranfield University). Smith and Raspin's combined work examines how executives scan the market environment to gather data, then organise the data into information and synthesise that information into market knowledge.

Research contributions

Contributions made by Smith and Raspin to this field of research include the following, both described in their book, Creating Market Insight:

• Identification of exactly what insight is and how it is distinct from knowledge. Smith and Raspin used concepts from Resource Based View of strategy.
• New thinking into the iterative process by which data is translated into value, a process captured in what has become known as the Smith Wheel.

In recent years, Smith has begun to explore the issue of strategy implementation. In academic presentations, he describes this as a 'messy' problem, poorly researched because it stretches across many different academic silos. He attempts to look at strategy implementation from two perspectives:

1. The role of individual commitment and motivation, using the work of Locke, Vroom and Meyer and Allen.
2. The role of intra-organisational conflict, which draws on earlier work on this subject by Pondy and Dutton and Walton, overlaying this with theories from social psychology such as Realistic Conflict Theory and Social Identity Theory.

This work has so far been published only in academic papers and internal Open University presentations.