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The marketing challenges within the enlarged single European Market
Edited by Stanley Paliwoda and Svetla Marinova [University of Strathclyde and Birmingham Business School]
Background
The widely accepted market orientation construct emphasises the critical role of effective internal interfaces in a market-oriented organisation ([13] Kohli and Jaworski, 1990; [25] Slater and Narver, 1994). Smoothly functioning interfaces ensure the timely dissemination of market information and the coordination of marketing activities in creating superior value for customers. For instance, an engineer that hears new information about a competitor's upcoming new product while he carries out maintenance at a customer plant should relay that information to the firm's R&D and marketing departments as part of the firm's market sensing process. Similarly, representatives from two business units that sell to the same customer need to coordinate their activities both to create maximum value for the customer and to enable the supplier to capitalise on new opportunities that present themselves. Several authors have argued for a horizontal organisation in which cross-functional teams focus on value-creating processes, such as new product development and order fulfilment ([4] Barabba, 1995; [11] Hammer and Stanton, 1999). Managers structure their organisations as "flexible groupings of intertwined work and information flows that cut horizontally across the business, ending at points of contact with customers" ([11] Hammer and Stanton, 1999, p. 108). In such a process organisation, each core process is assigned a process owner who is responsible for coordinating activities from several departments to create superior customer value.
But in practice, most firms are still structured vertically, e.g. as a series of business functions, product groups or geographical areas. Such vertical organisational structures typically function as a series of corporate fiefdoms, where managers jealously guard their turf, resulting in fierce battles for resources, misunderstandings and conflicts. This is aptly illustrated by the substantial body of research into the marketing-R&D interface in the context of new product development ([9] Griffin and Hauser, 1996; [10] Gupta et al. , 1986; [22] Parry and Song, 1993; [26] Souder, 1981). Similarly, other researchers investigated the interfaces between marketing and engineering, manufacturing or purchasing ([14] Lancaster, 1993; [27] St. John and Hall, 1991; [7] Crittenden et al. , 1993; [29] Williams et al. , 1994). Building on this research about interfunctional...