ABSTRACT
Marketing is one of the central functions of a firm, the others typically being, Research and Development, Manufacturing or Operations, Finance, IT, and HR. Whereas the other functions concentrate on internal matters, marketing’s focus is solely the customer. Marketing is the most critical of all activities for without a customer there is no revenue, leaving little for the other functions to do. In the last chapter, we stressed the importance of adopting a marketing orientation. By creating goods that cater to the needs of the target market, a company creates a loyal customer base. Successfully implementing a customer-centric philosophy requires coordination among all levels of the organization. For small sized companies, it is possible to align the company’s resources to meeting the target market’s needs without a formal plan. For large sized companies, it is impossible. Large, diversified companies sell a variety of goods in an equally diverse set of industries to a diverse group of customers. To become more customer focused, large companies divide the organization into smaller units to decentralize managerial control: at the top there is the corporate unit, followed by the business unit and lastly the product unit. In this chapter we take a look at how marketing fits into the overall firm’s strategy, and the decisions managers at the corporate and business unit level make in order to achieve those
goals. Chapters three through five explore the issues managers face at the product unit level.
