Reconsidering the Management of Marketing

The pace and extent of change in marketing landscape over the past decade has left many questioning the worth of marketing and its tenets. For many marketing educators it is a period of doubt and self-searching about the efficacy and role of the discipline. Yet empirical evidence reveals firms that have not only coped with these changing circumstances but have also found new and imaginative ways of winning competitive advantage. Marketing practice is adopting novel shapes and modes. In the field of management in general, new approaches to understanding and running organisations are being considered. One way of comprehending an organisation is to "unbundle" it into the key processes and activities that enable it to succeed. A number of such constituent processes are essentially about marketing and strongly dependant on marketing knowledge and competence. To add such a process-based view of marketing to more traditional perspectives, and to consider marketing in terms of four core processes - a marketing strategy process; a marketing managment process; an order generation, fulfilment and service process;and a new product development process - facilitates a reconceptualisation of how marketing is best managed.