W
e now turn from the strategic and tactical management of marketing to its ad-
ministration. Our goal is to examine how firms organize, implement, evaluate, and
control their marketing activities.RENDS IN COMPANY ORGANIZATION
Companies often need to restructure their business and marketing practices in re-
sponse to significant changes in the business environment, such as globalization,
deregulation, computer and telecommunications advances, and market fragmenta-
tion. The main responses of business firms to a rapidly changing environment have
included these:■ Reengineering: Appointing teams to manage customer-value building processesand
trying to break down department walls between functions.
■ Outsourcing: A greater willingness to buy more goods and services from outside
vendors when they can be obtained cheaper and better this way.
■ Benchmarking: Studying “best practice companies” to improve the company’s per-
formance.
■ Supplier partnering: Increased partnering with fewer but larger value-adding sup-
pliers.
■ Customer partnering: Working more closely with customers to add value to their
operations.
■ Merging: Acquiring or merging with firms in the same industry to gain
economies of scale and scope.
■ Globalizing: Increased effort to both “think global” and “act local.”
■ Flattening: Reducing the number of organizational levels to get closer to the cus-
tomer.
■ Focusing: Determining the most profitable businesses and customers and focusing
on them.
■ Empowering: Encouraging and empowering personnel to produce more ideas and
take more initiative.All these trends will undoubtedly have an impact on marketing organization and prac-
tices.
The role of marketing in the organization will also have to change. Traditionally,
marketers have played the role of middlemen, charged with understanding customer
needs and transmitting the voice of the customer to various functional areas in the
organization, who then acted upon these needs. Underlying this conception of the
marketing function was the assumption that customers were hard to reach and could
not interact directly with other functional areas. But in a networked enterprise, every
functional area can interact with customers, especially electronically. Marketing no
longer has sole ownership of customer interactions; rather, marketing needs to inte-
grate all the customer-facing processes so that customers see a single face and hear a
single voice when they interact with the firm.
Another way to look at these changes in marketing organization and role is through
the analogy of sports: See the Marketing Insight “Sports Analogies for the Marketing
Organization.”ARKETING ORGANIZATION
Over the years, marketing has grown from a simple sales department into a complex
group of activities. We will examine how marketing departments have evolved in com-
panies, how they are organized, and how they interact with other company depart-
ments.part five
Managing and
Delivering Marketing(^680) Programs
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