Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Principle 4: marketing is too important to leave to the marketing department 
(if there is one)
It is increasingly the case that marketing is everyone’s job in an organisation. If we adopt the 
cultural stance explored earlier, then this is understandable as the actions of all can impact 
on the overall satisfaction derived by the customer.
In an early work by King (1985), he highlights a number of misconceptions as to what 
marketing is. One of the most insidious misconceptions he terms ‘marketing department 
marketing’. This is where an organisation employs marketing professionals who are good 
at analysing marketing data and calculating market shares to three decimal points, but who 
have very little impact on products and services. Here, the marketing department is seen as 
the only department where ‘marketing is done’, so other departments can get on with their 
own agenda and pursue their own goals.
As organisations become flatter, reducing layers of bureaucracy, and continue to break 
down spurious functional barriers between departments, it becomes increasingly obvious that 
marketing is the job of everyone. It is equally obvious that marketing is so central to both 
survival and prosperity, that it is far too important to leave only to the marketing department.
However, it is also clear that we must avoid simply stating that marketing is ‘every-
one’s job’ and leaving it at that. If marketing is everyone’s job, then the important issues 
of accountability and responsibility become problematic to a degree, and marketing may 
well become ‘no one’s job’. Greyser (1997) points to the need for simultaneous upgrading 
of market orientation and downsizing of the formal marketing function as two sides of the 
same issue:
While the marketing function (‘doing marketing’) belongs to the marketing department, 
becoming and being marketing-minded is everybody’s job. What happens when (almost) 
everybody is doing that job? As companies have become more marketing-minded, there 
have been substantial reductions in the formal ‘marketing departments’ which do market-
ing. In short, a corollary of the trend to better organisational thinking about marketing is 
the dispersion of the activity of marketing, e.g. via task forces.