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This article is provocative and valuable for practitioners, researchers, and educators. However, one thing that nagged me as I read the article (and is evident in popular media as well) is the narrowness with which practitioners view "marketing." Too many see the discipline as being limited to advertising and a few related activities. In that regard, I agree that "marketing's" influence within the firm is decreasing. But, it appears to me that if the authors' analyses had combined the category that was called "sales" with the "marketing" category then the results would have been different. Thus, one of the conclusions could have been that if a firm defines "marketing" in a very narrow sense then it will have less influence on the firm than when you take into account all marketing functions, regardless of what department they are housed in.

Congratulations to the authors for addressing an issue of major professional concern in a methodologically thorough way. I wonder whether another reason for a marketing department's loss of influence, that can be examined in future replications of this study, is that it is perceived by CEO's as no longer being a source of competitive advantage. I suspect that accountability and innovativeness as not components of that concept.

It's just right that the marketing department should contribute to the organic growth of the firm if they want to regain their influence.
They should plan and get more strategies to attain better influence next time.

Although the authors do accept the cultural perspective of marketing orientation (Narver & Slater, 1990) their conceptualization suffers from a fundamental flaw. Narver and Slater (1990) state that the firms desire to acquire a sustainable competitive advantage leads them to specific market oriented behavior. Likewise, Kohli and Jaworski (1990) state that market orientation is based on organization wide beliefs and norms, giving rise to market oriented processes and can be considered as a process of continuous innovation. Furthermore, researchers who have accepted the cultural definition of market orientation have identified the new product development process as a set of mediating variables between market orientation and performance (Langerak, Hultink, & Robben 2007).But whereas, Verhoef and Leeflang (2009) define marketing innovativeness as the degree to which the marketing department contributed to the development of new products within the firm and is positioned as an antecedent to market orientation. How can you develop successful new products if you do not have customer insights (generated by market orientation) to being with? Secondly, they also include customer connection or in other words the ability to decipher customer needs into solutions and communicate them across cross functional departments as an indirect antecedent to market orientation. This concept is very similar to the market orientation concepts of intelligence dissemination, generation, and cross functional alignment. The influence of this variable is understandably insignificant, since many authors have found these to be a part of the process of market orientation rather than an antecedent to it. But the value Verhoef and Leeflang’s (2009) model is that they were able o show that accountability, meaning being accountable within the organization, having the right metrics to measure that performance, leads to a motivation to be market oriented.