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Purpose To successfully create customer value, firms must use coherent market strategies and perform value-creating activities that enable them to develop solutions to customers’ needs. However, as firms exhibit differences in how they approach value creation, their market strategies will also differ. These differences among market strategies can be described through different combinations of proactivity and responsiveness, representing each firm’s value-creation logic. This study aims to increase understanding of how firms can improve the effectiveness of their market strategies by considering their associated value-creation logics. Design/methodology/approach The authors conceptualize market strategies as coherent sets of value-creating activities. While the types of activities within a market strategy are driven by a firm’s strategic orientations, how these activities are performed is influenced by its value-creation logic. With this as the foundation, the authors develop a conceptual typology of archetypal market strategies based on the different value-creation logics that influence them. Findings The authors propose four distinct market strategies – habitual, visionary, adaptive and ambidextrous – representing unique ways in which value-creation logics influence the formation of market strategies. Furthermore, the authors highlight the need for activities to reflect consistent value-creation logics to create coherent market strategies and the authors provide an exploration of the activities that enable firms to implement different types of market strategies. Originality/value The typology expands the concept of market strategy, introducing the idea of a value-creation logic of proactivity and responsiveness, and thus demonstrating the need for more in-depth consideration of the value-creating activities that constitute market strategies to better understand how firms can create superior customer value.

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The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them."

The scope of this article is an inter-industry study of the Swedish Wood Manufacturing Sector (WMS), examined from the perspective of the Structure-Conduct-Performance (SCP) paradigm in the theoretical field of Industrial Organization. The four research questions are: (1) identify the industries within the sector, (2) construct a contextually adapted SCP model and form the basis for hypotheses of relationships between the different variables in the model, (3) establish quantitative correlations between the variables, and finally (4) present a basically qualitative, explanatory interpretive analysis.The empirical investigation is a total population study of 311 firms. Nine industries are identified, and an SCP model is presented including four explanatory variablesexposure to international competition, value-added scope, domestic demand growth potential and (domestic industry) seller concentrationand two performance variablesindustry profitability (ROA) and industry growth.The combined qualitative and quantitative explanatory analysis identifies some important relationships in the SCP model. The most prominent findings are the strong negative relationships between exposure to international competition and industry profitability and industry growth. Another finding is that strong positive relationships are found between the degree of value-added scope and industry profitability and industry growth.