Marketing Department

"Riten" <riten.bhatia@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:12uc3cal3a09s70@news.supernews.com...
>
> Hi all, I have a question about how your marketing departments are
> organized. I think ours is strange in my company, and I would like to
> propose a better way. How is marketing organized in your companies?
> What is the hierarchy, and what positions do you have in marketing?
> Who does marketing report to, and what things exactly is your
> marketing department responsible for?
>
> I work for a project based company so all our marketing is project to
> project based (service oriented). I am trying to establish a central
> marketing department for the whole company which supports all our
> projects.
>
> If anyone knows where I might find more info on the organization and
> structure of efficient marketing departments, I would really
> appreciate it.
>
> Thanks!
>
>

The short answer is, "it depends". There really is no one best way to
structure a marketing department; each situation must be individually
tailored. As a general rule, however, marketing departments (in middle
market to large companies) usually have four levels which go something like
this:

Top Level: Chief Marketing Officer (reports to CEO)
Second Level: Marketing Director (and/or Senior Marketing Director)
Third Level: Marketing Managers (and/or Senior Marketing Managers)
Bottom Level: Marketing Specialists or Account Executives

Director-level individuals usually have department-level responsibility.
Manager-level individuals usually have product or customer segment-level
responsibility. Marketing specialists/account executives support marketing
managers and usually do not have any direct reports.

A fundamental approach is to organize your department around products or
customer segments, with one manager-level individual assigned for each.

--
Rod H., MBA, MS
Marketing and Business Performance Improvement Consultant
www.bpi-consortium.com

First, for some reason, I cannot directly reply to the original post
to this thread. Odd. The following then isn't a reply to BPI's post
but the Riten's.

Riten,

How a marketing department is arranged depends on what kind of
marketing it does. Marketing is an umbrella concept. Its usual
components are marketing strategy, publicity, advertising, sales, and
market research. They create a loop that feeds and refines itself.
Each of the five could be broken into more narrower niches. You could
also add other components depending on your situation.

Until you get to the major corporation level, marketing strategy is
usually just one person and s/he is the top person in the marketing
department. This marketing strategist provides the marketing plan
that the rest of the marketing department follows. Good marketing
takes into account what all components are doing and how each
component affects all the other components.

In very small businesses, the entire marketing department is just one
person. It could be the owner in a one-man shop. A person that knows
what they're doing as far as marketing goes is still concerned with and does
all the components above and has to think how each task affects the others.
As the company grows, this solo marketer will be able to hire people
to help with the company's marketing and begin the wonderful (and
usually stressful) job of delegating tasks to these new people. Task
= a component of marketing.

Personally, I believe the key to good marketing is properly managed
market research. Good MR tracks the successes and failures of all the
other components then makes educated guesses why they happened. This
is turned over to the marketing strategist who -- if they have an
active brain cell -- doesn't take MR's word as gospel but tests MR's
guesses to see if they're right. For example, if MR says that it appears that
a green background might get better responses from direct mail literature, the
marketing strategist might test this by having almost-identical junk mail with
half having a green background and the other half having a blue. MR then tracks
results and sees if its guess was right.

A properly-run marketing department isn't set in stone but is fluid.
It adjusts to the world around it and the needs of the company. Job
positions are continuously created and eliminated to meet this
challenge. Any company that tries to enforce a rigid corporate
structure on their marketing department are simply morons. It usually
means that a non-marketer has taken over as CEO and the company is
either in decline or about to go into decline.

Scott