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.
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Brian David Smith was born in Hebburn in 1961. 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,[1] 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.[2] Smith is also the editor of the Journal of Medical Marketing, a peer-reviewed journal.[3]
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[4] and serves on the committee of the Medical Marketing Group.[5]
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.
Smith's research brings together various streams of previous research by others in the field.
Contributions made by Smith to this field of research include:
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.
Contributions made by Smith and Raspin to this field of research include the following, both described in their book, Creating Market Insight:
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:
This work has so far been published only in academic papers and internal Open University presentations.