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Session 10: Marketing & Operations Coordination, Christopher and Ryal…
Session 10: Marketing & Operations Coordination
Why is strategic coordination important?
Companies driven by marketing planning can let operations strategy drift.
A distant relationship between marketing and operations strategy can lead to unrealistic customer expectations to attract sales. (Piercy, 2010)
Leads to customer complaints & arguments between functions.
Causes of conflicts
Difference in way marketing managers and operations managers are evaluated and rewarded, marketing being profit and operations being cost-oriented.
Marketers work with qualitative data whilst operations uses quantified data. Two can be difficult to match up.
Cultural differences. Marketers and operations have different task orientations and social concerns.
Complicating factors
Need to interface with each other and other functions.
Need for cooperation being greater for companies undergoing rapid growth.
Technological change puts greater strain on product demand and processes.
Difficulty to change increasingly automated operations.
Greater visibility of poor performance from capital costs and constraints.
Tension between the two increases when market requirements change
Situations where this can occur
Nature of competition changes
Customers' needs adapt
Operations requirements change
Marketing strategies enter new markets with different performance objectives
Subtle changes to market positioning requires operations to adapt its strategy
Competitors force change through marketing and operations.
How to improve coordination
Traditional management of marketing channels is being replaced by holistic approaches which prioritise...(Winterberry Group, 2012)
Speed
To increase responsiveness and reduce the cost of life cycle times.
Insight
To improve understanding of customers, target segments and use the best mix of media to reach them.
Access
To provide dynamic capability through continuous input facility.
Flexibility
To adapt to changing needs, priorities, preferences and demand.
Bringing activities of demand creation and demand fulfilment closer together.
Christopher and Ryals (2014) propose a discipline of demand chain management to fulfil this.
Framework shows there might be degrees of coordination between marketing and operations functions.
Limited to short-term collaboration on activities such as promotions that create demand surges.
Fullest extent the process of developing marketing and operations plans could be fully integrated.
