The organizational roles of marketing and marketing managers

JURNAL : Osman Go¨k and Gungor Hacioglu

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to design a comprehensive responsibilities inventory for
today’s marketing managers, from which it develops factual inferences for the role of marketing in
corporations.
Design/methodology/approach – A content analysis on online job announcements is used to define
the role inventory of the marketing manager.
Findings – The findings reveal that marketing managers are responsible for six role dimensions in the
organization. The marketing manager’s assigned roles are for the management of promotion-related
activities of the company, rather than for managing othermarketing mix elements. Communicational and
relational (internal and external) role clusters are the most frequently addressed of marketing managers’
responsibilities. Knowledge development and injection of market and marketing knowledge into the
company’s value network is another of the major role dimensions. Increasing financial pressures on
companiesmean that the outcomes ofmarketing actionsmust be measurable, so developing and reporting
performance analysis and financial metrics for marketing activities has become an important part of the
manager’s agenda.
Originality/value – The paper is the first attempt to develop a role inventory for the marketing
manager that embraces proofs, signals, and insights from the practice.


Keywords Marketing, Marketing management
Paper type Research paper