The marketing analyst’s continuum positioning approach to developing pragmatic insight.

Marketing and competitive analysis (MCA) has been part of the curriculum for marketing students and practitioner certification courses for many decades in post-secondary institutions. The implicit assumption that such knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs), or competencies, can be taught, often goes unchallenged. Even after years of rigorous, mainly classroom-based preparation, marketing graduates themselves, and their employers, frequently report that they are not adequately prepared for the MCA task. This situation has led the authors to investigate the question of whether pragmatism in MCA can actually be taught. A new conceptualization is suggested, to help address this situation, one which has been successfully applied in both corporate and graduate MCA development and training programmes. Based on a positioning approach conducted within ten continua, the conceptualisation suggests that MCAs must learn to consider and integrate their insights about these elements within the ongoing conduct of their work. Success in knowing where to emphasize their efforts, knowledge and resources along these continua can potentially lead to improved analysis outcomes. The paper discusses the extant problems in MCA and its instruction, the ten continua, and reports on further research currently being conducted by the authors to empirically examine the framework