panies might monitor brand awareness or attitudes and usage every
month, but fail to pay equal attention to such vital performance
indicators as employee and customer satisfaction.
Organizational issues
We earlier described the way in which organizations are increas-
ingly becoming ‘process oriented’ rather than ‘functionally
focused’. The implications of this transition for marketing are sig-
nificant. Firstly, as processes are by definition ‘market facing’ then,
in effect, the whole business has to be concerned with the achieve-
ment of marketing goals. Furthermore, the Relationship Marketing
philosophy implies that the organization as a whole seeks to estab-
lish mutually profitable relationships with customers. Thus it
follows that marketing can no longer be the sole concern of the mar-
keting ‘department’ but rather becomes the concern of all. This idea
has always been true and few would dispute the underlying philos-
ophy. However, the reality has been that marketing has become very
much a functional concern in most organizations over the years.
If anything, the new role of marketing in the firm is more chal-
lenging than was ever the case before. Now, marketing must take
responsibility for translating the overall strategy of the business into
specific plans for each process. Once the organization as a whole has
decided upon how it wishes to compete and the value proposition
that it wants to deliver, marketing must identify and link individual
process strategies so that together the corporate goals are achieved.
Figure 6.8 provides an example of how one fmcg company has
redefined its business around market-facing processes and how
marketing planning becomes the key integrative activity.
Whilst such a model seems enticingly attractive, it has to be recog-
nized that its achievement requires significant organizational and cul-
tural change. For instance, working across functions using multi-
disciplinary teams becomes the norm in these types of organization:^13
We now work much more within teams, which include marketing
expertise, but also include people representing the different disci-
plines of the business – production, distribution, finance, R&D. We
have come out of functional silos and into a flatter team-oriented
structure.Creating and implementing relationship marketing strategies 423