Marketing And Purchasing Integration

Organizing and Integrating Marketing and Purchasing in Business Markets

1. Introduction

Are organizational issues in business-to-business marketing back to the top of the agenda? After two decades of discussing new perspectives, new orientations, new logics, and new paradigms in marketing, isn't it time to think about their implementation; or at least about the translation of these new ideas into organizational devices. Concepts such as “customer orientation”, “relationship marketing”, “service dominant logic”, “product to solution evolution”, or “supply chain management” have been developed, discussed, and criticized. But what do they mean by companies' configuration? We argue that scholars in the field of business marketing have long concentrated their research efforts on inside-out processes. They have given priority to interorganizational questions. But isn't business marketing also a matter of women and men, their practices, the activities linking them, and the structures providing orientation — like departments, functions and positions? Isn't it also a matter of organization? We believe that the answer is yes. And as a consequence, these intraorganizational issues should not and cannot be separated from the interorganizational ones.

Against this background we are pleased to introduce this special issue on “organizing and integrating marketing and purchasing in business markets”. Its aim is to address two main research issues: Firstly, the impact that a relational context — in particular the variety of interactions and interdependencies between customers and suppliers — may have on the strategic role, organization, capabilities and performance of the marketing and purchasing functions. Secondly, the integration of these two functions between them and with other functions within the firm.

The papers in this special issue deal with a broad spectrum of industries and subject areas, use different methodological approaches, draw different sets of conclusions and find a variety of implications. Nevertheless, they have a common denominator: they all deal with issues related to the organization of the marketing function, or the organization of the purchasing function or the marketing/purchasing integration, and the connection between those intraorganizational aspects and the interorganizational aspects of customer or supplier relationships.

2. What does “research on marketing organization” mean?

Several authors have attempted to define the scope of marketing organization both as a field of research and a domain of management. Workman, Homburg and Gruner argue that “the topic of marketing organization fundamentally addresses the allocation of activities to groups” (1998, p.21). Two perspectives can be distinguished in studies on marketing organization. The functional group perspective considers marketing as a group within the organization which has a clearly defined functional specialization. The activity-based perspective interprets the domain of marketing organization as a set of activities (e.g., advertising, product management, market research, sales, and customer service).

Harris and Ogbonna (2003) claim that research on marketing organization can be classified into three streams: “the structural location of the marketing function, the influence of marketing and activity-based research into marketing organization” (p. 484). The first stream can be illustrated by the works of (Ruekert et al., 1985), (Achrol, 1991) and (Achrol, 1997), or Achrol and Kotler ...