Structuring Marketing Resources

Whether marketing activities are centralized or decentralized and whether they involve a fully integrated marketing department or a marketing unit with more limited responsibilities,structuring the array of marketing resources in a formal organization design involves important management choices.

1.Functional organizational design:

This design assigns departments,groups or individuals,responsibility for specific activities,such as advertising and sales promotion,pricing,sales,marketing research and marketing planning and services.

2.Product - focused design:

The product mix may require special consideration in the organizational design.New products often do not receive the attention they need unless specific responsibility is assigned to the planning and coordination of the new product activities.

Product-

The product or brand manager,sometimes assisted by one or a few additional people,is responsible for planning and coordinating various business functions for the assigned products.

Category Management-

Associated with the Efficient Consumer Response approach to supply chain management,one development in product focused organization is the adoption of category management structures.

Venture Teams-

The venture team requires the creation of an organizational unit to perform some or all of the new product planning functions.This unit may be a separate division or company created specifically for new product or new business ideas and initiatives.

New Product Teams-

The new product team is similar to a venture team in that it is comprised of functional specialists working on a specific new product development project.

3.Market -Focused Design:

This approach is used when a business unit serves more than one market target and customer consideration are an important factor in the design of the marketing organization.

4.Matrix Design:

This design utilizes a cross classification approach to emphasize two different factors,such as products and marketing functions.In addition to working with salespeople,product managers coordinate other marketing functions such as advertising and marketing research.

5.New Marketing Roles:

As we discussed early in the chapter,the use of self managing employee teams,emphasis on business processes rather than activities and the application of information technology are creating major changes in organization design.

*New Marketing Specializations-

The identification of new specialist roles in marketing processes raises the question of appropriate location in the organization structure.

*Venture Marketing Organizations-

An interesting approach adopted by some companies extends the idea of venture teams,as a way of responding to high priority opportunities faster than conventional organizational approaches allow.

*Partnering With Other Organizations-

Selecting or modifying marketing organization design should take into consideration the trade offs between performing marketing functions within the organization and having external organizations perform the functions.

*Networked Organizations-

The marketing coalition company has been proposed as another new organization form for marketing.The marketing coalition company is an horizontally aligned organization acting as the control center for organizing a network of specialist firms.

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