Vierula, Markku

Markku Vierula is a strategy author, consultant, and creative leader based in Helsinki,

Finland.

His career spans more than three decades at the intersection of creative leadership and

strategic thinking. He has worked as a copywriter, creative director, founder, and owner of

leading marketing agencies in Finland and internationally -- a career that gave him rare

insight into how companies across a wide range of industries actually think about strategy,

competitive positioning, and market creation.

This long practice of working at the intersection of creativity and strategy led to a question that

would shape his thinking for years: why do so few companies have a genuine competitive

advantage -- and why does the strategic thinking most organizations rely on make it so

difficult to find one?

The answer, he concluded, lies in the dominance of product-oriented, production-oriented,

and competitor-oriented thinking -- frameworks that optimize within existing markets rather

than questioning whether those markets are the right ones. The missing paradigm is

proactive market-oriented thinking: the discipline of asking what the market needs before

defining what you make.

Vierula holds an Executive MBA and has spent more than fifteen years as a business author.

His previous book, Suuri integraatiokirja (Alma Talent, 2014), with a foreword by Professor

Don E. Schultz of Northwestern University, was adopted as a university textbook.

His Springer Nature book Find Your Market-Oriented Competitive Advantage (2024) has

been adopted by 204 academic libraries including Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, MIT, Kellogg,

and Berkeley, and endorsed by Philip Kotler. He is the founder of Vierula Consulting.