ABSTRACT
This is where we talk about the vexed issue of organizing for marketing (or actually not as turns out frequently to be the case these days). As a formal or professional business function, marketing is in the doghouse – its status has probably reached an all-time low. If you look at the weak and tokenistic way we organized ourselves to do marketing, this is not wholly surprising. If we follow the logic of market-led strategic change, then the issue is how do we get a company’s act together around what matters to customers? We have coined the term “total integrated marketing” to identify this goal – pulling everything together across the different departments and external partner organizations to deliver superior value to customers. Sounds easy. It is not. It helps if we put marketing into the context of the major shifts in organizational design being experienced in companies (which helps), and then adopt a process-based perspective on marketing (which helps a lot more). The agenda for building the type of organizational infrastructure capable of managing the innovation, change, collaboration and new business models we have been describing is not straightforward. However, it probably matters quite a lot if we are serious about getting stuff done. It is more about managing processes for change than building bigger marketing departments. The structure of the chapter is summarized in Figure 12.1.
