Teaching Dynamic Competition in Marketing

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how marketing instructors can prepare students for the real world of dynamic, even hyper-kinetic, competition by teaching resource-advantage (R-A) theory of competition. Accordingly, this paper reviews the problem of marketing students’ lack of preparation for real-world, dynamic competition which is a result of the static-equilibrium focus of the theories of competition that they learn in their economics courses, and shows how the problem can be resolved by exposing students to the dynamic competition of R-A theory. Specifically, we provide answers to five questions concerning pedagogy and R-A theory: (1) Why should students learn about dynamic competition, in general, and R-A theory, in particular? (2) What should students read prior to class? (3) What background information should be discussed? (4) Which figures and tables should be used? (5) What does R-A theory imply for teaching marketing? Overall, in addition to providing students an understanding of dynamic competition, R-A theory “pulls together” theories of marketing strategy. In fact, in graduate and undergraduate marketing strategy classes that use R-A theory, instructors report that they see extensive use by students of R-A theory and the theory’s lexicon, R-A theory’s conceptual frameworks, and central tenets of different forms of marketing strategy.