Market-Shaping as Meta-Strategy : A Strategy of Strategies

Abstract: Markets are increasingly perceived as malleable systems constituted by actors that endogenously generate and shape the market. This view extends the traditional market view beyond the buyer-seller dyad and encompasses both directly market-related actors such as companies, suppliers, and buyers but also nonmarket actors such as regulators, lobbyists, journalists, activists, and the wider public. This alternative view has led to the emergence of market-shaping strategies, which refer to a focal company’s deliberate efforts to alter market characteristics, such as price levels or nonmarket elements, such as regulations, in its favor. Most descriptions of market-shaping strategies suggest that they influence both the market and nonmarket environments synergistically, and thus resemble the concept of an integrated strategy. However, given the systemic nature of markets, a company shaping a market may need to combine intended actions aimed at realizing the focal company’s market-shaping vision and emergent actions as response to emerging system dynamics. This implies that a market-shaping strategy may be constituted by different strategies with different but synergistic goals unified by the overarching goal of realizing the focal company’s market-shaping goal. In other words, a market-shaping strategy may be a strategy of strategies – a meta-strategy.  Moreover, previous research has indicated the significant potential of market-shaping strategies to improve the financial performance of companies as well as the overall market performance by increasing market size, market growth and value creation. However, despite this potential, the notion of market-shaping strategies has remained conceptually and empirically underdeveloped.   This dissertation seeks to improve our understanding of market-shaping strategies by analyzing the constituent dimensions of market-shaping strategies and by presenting new empirical insights into how such strategies are employed. Hereby, two papers synthesize extant literature on market-shaping to analyze and conceptualize the underlying process of market-shaping strategies as well as a typology of distinct market-shaping strategies. The other two papers provide new empirical evidence concerning the employment of market-shaping strategies by investigating the influence of market-shaping roles and capabilities on the market-shaping efforts of a focal company.  Drawing on the findings in the appended papers, this dissertation examines market-shaping strategies from the perspective of a market, nonmarket, integrated, and meta-strategy to reduce the concept’s theoretical and conceptual ambiguity and enhance our conceptual and empirical knowledge of how market-shaping strategies are construed and employed.   This dissertation proposes market-shaping to be a meta-strategy of different integrated strategies focused on shaping both the market and nonmarket environment, while mitigating system dynamics and pursuing the overarching goal of shaping a market. This meta-strategic perspective provides a more nuanced and structured approach to understanding market-shaping strategies, reducing ambiguity, and emphasizing the interrelations between different environments and strategies. Through this structured approach, the interrelations between the different environments and strategies are emphasized, rendering dynamics and synergies between the two more comprehensible and highlighting the necessity for systemic strategies.  Thereby, this dissertation contributes to the literature on market shaping by providing a more detailed understanding of the nature and dimensions of market-shaping strategies, and how such strategies are employed by companies in practice. Through this effort, several theoretical and managerial implications are proposed as well as policy implications suggested that indicate a potential dark side of market-shaping strategies.