Marketing Functions Across the Organization

In the old days, marketing functions and activities were often siloed, whereby marketers had little connectivity with other parts of the organization. In the past, marketing’s functions were largely focused on advertising communications, such as media selection and management, creative (copy development), and packaging design. Likewise, there were few connections with other business units—perhaps with the sales and product divisions, but loosely.

Today, marketing is becoming more and more integrated within organizations. Marketers are expected to work closely with most business units to ensure that the marketing strategy is effective and integrated across the business. In turn, marketing’s visibility, relevance, and status within organizations have significantly increased. Let’s talk a little more about this within the context of specific business units:

Sales

Certainly, one of marketing’s most fundamental functions is to make customers aware of and to communicate the value of the company’s offerings. The sales teams then take that momentum and move customers through the funnel toward purchase. Sales and marketing folks should work together in a feedback loop where marketing provides important information about target markets to help sales better connect with customers and sales provides marketing with frontline information from the customers themselves. (This information could be captured in the form of qualitative data from informal discussions or quantitative data from a customer relations management system like Salesforce.)

Supply Chain

Fundamentally, supply chain management is the act of ensuring that product is available to meet customer demand. Given that a primary marketing function is connecting customers with products, you can see that there’s a logical relationship between these two business units. If marketing engages in a media push or new campaign to ramp up sales, the organization needs to be ready to provide product to eager customers. Therefore, it’s essential that these two groups have a close partnership.

Information Technology

There are several important ways that marketing and IT fit together. The first relates to marketing’s traditional function of content delivery and messaging, which ties into website and mobile management (including e-commerce). Today, if marketing and IT aren’t working together to produce digital experiences that enhance customer impressions and facilitate key business outcomes, there’s likely to be a huge breakdown. The second way that IT and marketing work together relates to data management: With the proliferation of big data and data-driven marketing (more on these in an upcoming lesson), there’s a significant demand on IT to support the technical infrastructure needed for data capture, storage, and access.

Customer Service

Good customer service (CS) is a critical component of overall customer experience. Businesses that have direct customer-service functions (e.g., aftermarket support) should pair CS with marketing to ensure that CS is executing the customer-experience strategy, which is usually managed by marketing. Likewise, CS is an important resource for understanding the customer, which marketing can use to calibrate messaging and other aspects of customer communication and interaction.

Research and Development (R&D)

Marketing plays a significant role in informing new product development; because marketers are customer focused, they can provide developers with valuable market and product information during the idea-generation phase of R&D. Likewise, as a new product moves through the development life cycle, marketing can help calibrate the offering through concept and product testing, packaging refinement, and product-line fit. In addition, marketing can provide other customer- and market-receptivity assessments to ensure that the product will be successfully received.

You can see that marketing’s role is certainly pervasive throughout an organization, requiring marketers to work closely with other business units, including sales, R&D, the supply chain, and IT. Likewise, marketers must take both macro and micro views of the business to make effective decisions and to develop unit marketing strategies that will support the business overall. To say that marketing has become the hub of the wheel is an understatement! 

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