ABSTRACT
In broad terms, marketing management can be defined as the process by which the firm responds to a changing marketplace. The past two decades have certainly been a period of rapid marketplace change, seen in the following environmental forces:
• global competition • organizational cost-cutting and down-sizing • heightened emphasis on short-term financial measures of business performance including
return on investment and quarterly earnings per share • increased use of outsourcing, often to offshore vendors • order-of-magnitude improvements in information processing speed and telecommunications • the Internet revolution including the boom, bust, and rebirth of electronic commerce • rapid growth of discount mass merchants such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Target
As organizations have changed in response to their environment, it would be logical to expect that marketing would also change. Given the presence of tougher competition, more demanding customers, and increasingly powerful channel members, marketing should have been leading organizational change. In fact, several marketing authors in the 1990s (for example, Day 1992; Haeckel 1999; McKenna 1991; Srivastava, Shervani, and Fahey 1999; and Webster 1992) put forth arguments that marketing competence in the form of customer orientation, market knowledge, and a focus on customer value would be the key to business performance and profitability in these dynamic market environments. Unfortunately, there is now widespread concern and mounting evidence that marketing has lost, not gained, the expected influence in the firm. Instead, the sales function has become much more powerful and has been allocated resources once controlled by marketing as firms have increasingly focused on short-term tactics and sales revenue more than on long-term market-development strategy and profitability (Webster, Malter, and Ganesan 2003). Marketing’s role appears to have been diminished in terms of both effectiveness and trust. This brief chapter will examine some of the causes and consequences.
