Unraveling firm-level activities for shaping markets

As the marketing literature increasingly construes markets as malleable entities, research studies of ‘marketshaping’strategies have gained increasing attention in recent years. Those are proactive, deliberate initiativeswhich a firm takes with the aim of re-shaping an operating environment comprising direct customers, customers'customers, and other actors such as its competitors. Our study derives a theoretical framework for marketshapingfrom the existing literature and an in-depth case study of one market-leading firm in the steel industry,which has been working actively in the shaping of a market. Analysis of the responses of a range of experiencedexecutive staff to unstructured and semi-structured interviews shows, among other things, that in order to shapethe market, the firm performed many individual and aggregated activities at three levels of influence – system,market offer and technology – with various actors in the market in focus. These findings are the basis of aproposed activity framework for the proactive shaping of a market: that is, what firms can do in order to shapean existing market, drive growth and create sustainable competitive advantage.Custova