Strategic Management and “Complex Products”: some notes about an interpretative model for business policies

This paper compares some studies in the field of economics and management in order to identify an innovative model of strategic management in reference to complex products. The work starting from (after having taken a critical look at) a critical analysis of structuralist studies, highlights the need to move from industry analysis to business analysis to define strategies, later on it offers a new definition of Product - increasingly made up of good /goods + service/services and subsequently seen as commodities - as well as a new definition of Consumer - as a person searching for characteristics in products and then seen as “usumer”. Such definitions underlie a model that allows the analysis of both market structure and market “soul”. The structuralism’s limitations – thanks to a brief analysis of literature – are considered outweighed by business models, among which one in particular is Abell’s model defining the (SBA) Strategic Business Areas. This study, after considering complex products and usumer, aims to complete Abell’s model and to provide a revision of it, in order to suggest new guidelines and interpretations mainly aimed to complex products such as the “Made in Italy”.