Management of Marketing Department and Function

Marketing Management Revision Article Series

In the 13th Edition Kotler explained this topic under the chapter heading 'Managing A Holistic Marketing Organization for the Long Run"


While CEO is the ultimate head of all departments, there is a Chief Marketing Officer to provide full time attention to the management of marketing department as well as marketing function.

Marketing is a function of business and many persons of the organization participate in marketing activities. But there is a department termed as marketing department that has specialists whose main focus is marketing. While CEO is the ultimate head of all departments, there is a Chief Marketing Officer to provide full time attention to the management of marketing department as well as marketing function.

Marketing Management Department Organization

There are various types of organizations in existence. Functional organization, geographical area organization, product based organization, customer segment based organization and some form of hybrids can be observed.

Functional marketing organization: The important functional areas can be marketing research, new product marketing, advertising and sales promotion, sales management, physical distribution (marketing logistics), and marketing administration. As organizations become big more specialized functions within marketing can be organized as independent sections.

Geographical Area Based Organization: Companies selling across the nation generally set up branch sales offices and regional sales offices.

Product Based Organization (Brand Management): In product based organization each product or brand has a manager who looks after its marketing activities. The sales staff can be common staff and they report to a sales manager.

Coordination Between Marketing and Other Departments

Kotler highlighted the fact that each business function has a potential impact on customer satisfaction. All departments need to think of customer satisfaction and work together to fulfill customer needs and expectations. The chief marketing man in the organization has two tasks: One is to manage the marketing department and other is to coordinate marketing specialist activities with marketing related activities of operations, finance, and other functions in the organization.

Research and Development and Marketing

R&D and marketing have to coordinate their activities for successful market-oriented research, development and new product introduction. Gupta,Raj,and Wilemon in their paper "A Model for Studying R&D-Marketing Interface in the Product Innovation Process" (Journal of Marketing, April 1986, pp. 7-17) found that R&D-Marketing coordination had a strong correlation with innovation success.

Engineering and Marketing

Engineering is responsible for details of design and manufacturing that provide the products with quality and profit potential. Marketing is also concerned with profits for the company. The view points of marketing and engineering are to be coordinated with good engineering economy analysis combined with demand analysis of marketers.

Manufacturing and Marketing

Balance and harmony in the company demand that manufacturing and marketing jointly determine what is in the company's best interests whenever a dispute arises between the departments. Solutions include joint seminars of issues of common interest and joint analytical problem solving. Company profitability is greatly affected by marketing-manufacturing coordination which is another name for customer service - profit analysis. Marketing can't take credit for revenue and blame manufacturing for costs. Marketing itself may be responsible for the costs and it may be recovering lower prices from customers. This is bad marketing decision making.

Finance and Marketing

Finance persons have to concur with economic analysis of marketing persons. The long term implications of marketing expenditures may not be understood by finance persons. Both finance and marketing department personnel need cross training and joining training to develop common or share understanding.

Marketing Practices and Management Practice Innovations and Developments

Many new developments in management were embraced by practitioners.

Reengineering
Outsourcing
Benchmarking
Supplier partnering
Customer partnering
Mergers and Acquisitions
Globalizing
Flat organization
Agile organization
Lean organization
Empowerment

Marketing departments also implemented these concepts.

Industrial Engineering of Marketing System

Marketing System Efficiency Engineering

Companies today are striving to make their marketing operations more efficient and their return on marketing investment more measurable. Marketing costs can amount to as much as a quarter of a company’s total operating budget. Marketers need better templates for marketing processes, better management of marketing assets, and better allocation of marketing resources.

More Details on marketing system efficiency engineering

Evaluation and Control of Marketing Activities, Investments and Expenditures


Originally posted by me in
Knol Number  3388

Updated 2018 - 24 February
 14 Mar 2016, 12 Nov 2012