Marketing implementation, organizational change and internal marketing strategy 537
integrate marketing competencies around
customers and markets.
Strategies and organizational arrangements will
be linked by customer-driven value-delivery
processes that are flexible and evolve in
response to market change.
The most serious competitive threats will be
from competitors who fundamentally redesign
their marketing organizations and systems for
going to market, not just their products,
because customers will increasingly buy the
firm’s value-delivery system, not just products.
Successful marketing organizations will have
the skills necessary to manage multiple
strategic marketing processes, many of which
have not traditionally been seen as in the
domain of marketing (e.g. supply chain
management, customer linking, product
offering development).
To this, add the growing evidence that many
companies will go to market through networks
held together by a variety of contracts, alli-
ances, partnerships, joint ventures and other
links – i.e. as virtual or hollow organizations
(e.g. see Cravens et al., 1996). It is unsurprising
that commentators point to the ‘reinvented
organization’ needed to compete on capabil-
ities, offer superior customer value and imple-
ment complex relationship strategies (Cravens
et al., 1997).
However, what remains hidden within
these new organizational forms and networks
is the question of how organizations can estab-
lish, maintain and sustain strategy implementa-
tion capabilities. For example, in the airline
industry, as companies move towards hollow
structures (the airline as brand and booking
system employing only core service and opera-
tional staff), it is becoming apparent that in
devolved network organizations, partner
organizations may not be committed to the
service quality and excellence needed to sustain
the airline’s brand. This suggests that new
organizational forms will bring a whole new
agenda of problems associated with imple-
mentation capabilities.
Turning from this scenario of future revo-
lution to the present status quo of the market-
ing organization also indicates more immediate
issues of implementation capabilities. It is
almost two decades since it was suggested that
the formal organizational positioning and
structuring of the marketing function appeared
to be subject to an underlying life cycle (Piercy,
1985). Since then, it has been shown, for
example, that the organization of marketing in
British companies has frequently fallen very
short of the integrated models familiar in the
prescriptive literature (Piercy, 1986). We found,
for example, stereotypical marketing organiza-
tions in British manufacturing firms to include
limited/staff role forms, responsible for limited
areas like market research and some sales
promotion; strategy/services forms, with plan-
ning responsibilities and little line responsibil-
ity; and selling-oriented forms, involved almost
wholly in field sales operations. The signifi-
cance of these observations lies primarily in the
symbolism of structure rather than the admin-
istrative substance. Tokenism in formal organi-
zational arrangements for marketing was taken
as indicative of a lack of resource control and
strategic influence for marketing in British
companies (Piercy, 1986).
More recently, the organization of market-
ing in Britain has been characterized by the
downsizing and closure of conventional market-
ing departments, reinforced by the impact of
category management and trade marketing
strategies, and the resurgence of the power of
sales departments and key account management
structures in managing customer relationships
in business-to-business markets (Piercy, 2002).
Correspondingly, many popular approa-
ches address marketing as an issue of process not
function – for example, as the ‘process of going to
market’, which cuts across traditional functional
and organizational boundaries (see Figure 21.2).
The implications of such marketing process
models for the redundancy of traditional func-
tional structures may be extreme, with the
unintended side-effect of further weakening the
marketing paradigm in organizations.