Marketing's relation with other departments

Marketing department has to coexist and work in coordination with other department within the organization. Marketing functions should interact harmoniously with other departments' functions. The success of the marketing department depends on the marketing manager's skill in working harmoniously with key people in the various functional departments, particularly research and development department, production department, finance department and personnel department.

Research and Development Department

In most companies marketing and research development department coexist but seldom cooperate. R & D people are mostly engineers who believe that "R&D makes and marketing takes." In realty, the two departments cannot function in isolation. R&D cannot operate without the marketing department's inputs about buyers' test and preferences, market trends and environmental opportunities, challenges and threats. Marketing also provides the outlet for testing and commercialization of the product developed by the R&D department. On the other side, marketing depends heavily on the R&D to come up with new product ideas that can be marketed profitably.

Production/ Operations Department

Most manufacturing companies have the production department while service organization all them operation department. The department has production/ operations specialists who are mostly technical people and who think in terms of productive utilization of men and machines. The department is not much concerned with the market needs and trends.

There are some areas on which the marketing department and the production/ operations departments mostly disagree. For example, the production department wants least changes on models due to technical difficulties, while the marketing department insists on frequent modifications on the product. Similarly, the production department wants to maintain an average quality of the product, while the marketing department wants very tight quality control. The production department wants a flexible production schedule while the marketing department insists on a tight delivery date. Despite these areas of differences some cooperation and give and take relationship is established between these two key departments.

Finance and Credit Department

An area of conflict with the finance and credit department is mainly centered on expenditure, budget and terms of sale. The finance department wants tight control expenditure, hard and fast budgets, tighter control credit and shorter payment cycles. On the other side, marketing department is more lavish in expenditure; want flexible budgets, and a flexible payment cycle. These two departments often disagree on the pricing. The finance department view that the price should cover all costs, while the marketing department likes to use the pricing for market development. In order to effectively coordinate with the finance department, the marketing manager should have a keen sense of the costs and financial methods adopted by the organization. The marketing department should also carefully watch the market development expenses of its sales people.

Human Resources Department

The marketing department relies heavily on the HRD for the supply of component marketing and sales people. The HRD is also responsible for providing training to the marketing people within the organization. There are fewer areas of conflicts between the HRD and the marketing department. However, the success of the marketing department depends heavily on the proper selection, recruitment, training, placement and motivation of its personnel which are in the domain of the HRD.