joint seminars to understand each other’s viewpoints, joint committees and liaison
personnel, personnel exchange programs, and analytical methods to determine the
most profitable course of action.^18
Company profitability depends on achieving effective working relations. Marketers
need to understand the marketing potentials of new manufacturing strategies—the
flexible factory, automation and robotization, just-in-time production, and total qual-
ity management. Manufacturing strategy depends upon whether the company wants
to win through low cost, high quality, high variety, or fast service. Manufacturing is
also a marketing tool insofar as potential customers may want to visit the factory to
assess how well it is managed.Operations
The term manufacturingis used for industries making physical products. The term op-
erationsis used for industries that create and provide services. In the case of a hotel,
for example, the operations department includes front-desk people, doormen, and
waiters and waitresses. Because marketing makes promises about service levels, it is
extremely important that marketing and operations work well together. If operations
personnel lack a customer orientation and motivation, negative word of mouth will
eventually destroy the business. Operations staff members may be inclined to focus
on their convenience and give ordinary service, whereas marketers want the staff to
focus on customer convenience and provide extraordinary service. Marketing people
must fully understand the capabilities and mind-set of those delivering the service
and continuously try to improve attitudes and capabilities.Finance
Financial executives pride themselves on being able to evaluate the profit implica-
tions of different business actions. Marketing executives ask for substantial budgets
for advertising, sales promotions, and sales force, without being able to prove how
much revenue these expenditures will produce. Financial executives suspect that the
forecasts are self-serving. They think marketing people do not spend enough time re-
lating expenditures to results. They think marketers are too quick to slash prices to
win orders, instead of pricing to make a profit. They claim that marketers “know the
value of everything and the cost of nothing.”
But marketing executives often see financial people as “knowing the cost of every-
thing and the value of nothing.” They see finance as controlling the purse strings too
tightly and refusing to invest in long-term market development. They think financial
people see all marketing expenditures as expenses rather than investments and are
overly conservative and risk averse, causing many opportunities to be lost. The solu-
tion lies in giving marketing people more financial training and giving financial peo-
ple more marketing training. Financial executives need to adapt their financial tools
and theories to support strategic marketing.Accounting
Accountants see marketing people as lax in providing sales reports on time. They dis-
like the special deals salespeople make with customers because these require special
accounting procedures. Marketers dislike the way accountants allocate fixed-cost bur-
dens to different products in the line. Brand managers may feel that their brand is
more profitable than it looks, the problem being that it is assigned too high an over-
head burden. They would also like accounting to prepare special reports on sales and
profitability by segments, important customers, individual products, channels, terri-
tories, order sizes, and so on.Credit
Credit officers evaluate potential customers’ credit standing and deny or limit credit
to the more doubtful ones. They think marketers will sell to anyone, including those
from whom payment is doubtful. Marketers, in contrast, often feel that credit stan-
dards are too high. They think that “zero bad debts” really means the company lost
a lot of sales and profits. They feel they work too hard to find customers to hear that
they are not good enough to sell to.part five
Managing and
Delivering Marketing(^692) Programs