The Relationship between Competitiveness and Digital Marketing Innovation for a Digital Campaign Design: First Insights Based on a Panel Study in Mexico.

• Author: Mejia-Trejo, Juan

INTRODUCTION

According to the OECD (2005), innovation is "the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new organizational method in business practices, workplace organization or external relations." Innovation aims to improve a firm's performance by gaining a competitive advantage. Marketing innovation is defined as "[t]he implementation of a new marketing method involving significant changes in product design or packaging, product placement, product promotion or pricing." As you can see, digital marketing is in itself an innovation and can be a potential driver to improve the current placing of Mexico's competitiveness (51/138 countries, WEF 2017). The web portal Millones de Voces (2017) reports a sector with more than 200 small and medium enterprises (SMEs), firms located in Guadalajara, Mexico and several recognized institutes that are teaching and training digital marketing. This sector is interested in a model that can be used to assess DMIM capability to improve competitiveness level based on the NCM. This study is divided into six sections: 1) Problem, hypotheses and rationale of the study; 2) Literature review; 3) Methodology based on two visions: those of academics and experts on digital marketing innovation and competitiveness to obtain a final DMIM related to the NCM, and the design of a questionnaire; 4) Results; 5) Conclusions; 6) Limitations and future studies.

PROBLEM, HYPOTHESES AND RATIONALE OF THE STUDY

Our problem is presented as a research question: What are the main variables of DMIM that are capable of improving the competitiveness level based on the NCM? To solve this, it is necessary to propose a construct based on two factors. Hence, regarding DMIM, we propose the following: SQ1 Are there differences between the academics' vision vs the experts' vision?; SQ2: What is the scheme of the model?; SQ3: What are the variables involved in constructing a final questionnaire?

LITERATURE REVIEW

The National Competitiveness Model (NCM)

Competitiveness is the ability and performance of a company, sub-sector or country to sell and supply goods and services in a given market, in relation to the ability and performance of other firms, sub-sectors or countries in the same market (IMCO, 2016; Kotler & Lane, 2006). As a part of the Quality National Prize (Premio Nacional de Calidad), Mexico has designed its own National Competitiveness Model (PNC, 2017), adopted here in this study, with the following variables shown in Table 1.

Digital Marketing Innovation

Competitiveness recognizes the potential of the innovation which is defined as "implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new organisational method in business practices, workplace organisation or external relations and it involves the innovation of: product, service, marketing, process and organization" (OECD, 2015). In this sense, digital marketing is of itself, an innovation; thus, the importance to get the DMIM, from which we have developed a definition:"[A] process to design strategies and tactics for planned implementation by selecting a set of digital marketing tools. These should be based on the mission-vision, the market segmentation, goal settings and value proposition of the firm and through monitoring performance profitability of the digital campaign design in a permanent way" (Mejia-Trejo, 2017, Mejia-Trejo et al., 2016; Kannan & Hongshuang, 2017; Smartlnsights, 2017; Scuotto, Del Giudice, & Carayannis, 2016; Egol, Peterson, & Stefan, 2014; Kharchuk, Kendzor, & Petryshyn, 2014). To determine the variables involved in the DMIM, we analysed 15 papers. The results are found in Table 2.

METHODOLOGY

A matrix was constructed to show the DMIM variables according to Table 2 representing the academic vision approach See Table 3.

After this, we applied the qualitative part of this research by applying the Delphi Panel and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP; Saaty, 1997) to the 200 specialists (100 professors and 100 CEO) in digital marketing as designers of digital campaigns. We focused on the experience of each of them in the association with the variables and the suggested order implemented to the DMIM. The results are showed in Table 4.

We excluded the variables of academic vision with AHP weighing (%) less than 2 in importance for practical reasons. We explained each of these variables to determine our general conceptual model of DMIM in the order suggested for implementation as follows. See Table 5.

RESULTS

The final DMMI-NCM ex ante is shown in Figure 1.

The final questionnaire proposed is shown in Table 6.

CONCLUSIONS

Starting from our research question: What main variables of the DMIM are capable of improving their competitiveness level based on the NCM? To solve this, it was necessary to propose a construct based on two factors. The first factor was taken from the National Competitiveness Model (NCM), but the second factor was the result of the Delphi Panel with Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and 200 (100 professors and 100 CEO) digital marketing specialists located in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Regarding the specific question SQ1: are there differences between the academics' vision vs. the experts' vision? There are important issues to consider when comparing the academics' vs. experts' vision (See Table 4). For instance, STG is cited as 19.6 % importance in terms of the academic vision vs, 9.7% of the expert vision (9.9 as % difference amongst them). The case is revised with 16.1% importance in terms of the academic version vs. 4.9% importance of expert vision (11.2 as % difference amongst them). Another similar case is the variable VAL with 10.7% importance of academic...