Marketing’s Influence Within the Firm
The March 2009 issue of Journal of Marketing includes a study by Peter Verhoef and Peter Leeflang (“Understanding the Marketing Department’s Influence Within the Firm”) whose findings are likely to appeal to both practitioners and academics in the marketing discipline. Motivated by recent declarations about the diminished influence of marketing and that marketing’s role has become less strategic and more tactical in character, the authors attempt to “determine and explain the level and determinants of the marketing department’s influence within the firm.”
Their conceptual model posits that two broad antecedent constructs—marketing department capabilities (e.g., accountability, innovativeness) and control variables (e.g., firm and environmental characteristics)—shape marketing’s influence within the firm (e.g., perceived influence, top management respect, decision influence). In turn, the latter positively influence business performance both directly and indirectly through marketing orientation. Finally, business performance is controlled for firm size and innovativeness.
With respect to marketing’s influence within the firm, Verhoef and Leeflang’s empirical results indicate that accountability and innovativeness of the marketing department are important determinants for all three measures of influence considered. For market orientation, the findings show that both perceived influence and top management respect are statistically significant predictors. Finally, their model results indicate that market orientation mediates the relationship between marketing influence and business performance. Overall, the authors conclude that their research affirms a weakened position of the marketing department in the firm. They suggest two possible approaches for marketing departments to regain their influence within firms: (1) They should become more accountable for the link between marketing actions and financial results, and (2) they should become more innovative by contributing to the firm’s organic growth. The former reflects the spirit of recent research in the marketing literature that explicitly links strategic marketing actions to widely recognized measures of financial performance.
I welcome the authors’ empirical contributions on this new research topic. I request JM readers to take a moment now to comment on their insights.
Siva K. Balasubramanian, Journal of Marketing Web site Editor
Comments
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.
Posted by: Gordon C. Bruner II | March 22, 2009 7:47 PM
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.
Posted by: David Corkindale | March 23, 2009 3:21 AM
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.
Posted by: Marketing Influence - Community Builder Blueprint | May 11, 2009 9:03 AM