What Is the Typical Organizational Structure of a Marketing Department?

The marketing department should be the driving force behind the formulation of business strategies for products and services. All business strategies need to start from the market, initiated by people who know the market better than the marketing department, and submit their marketing research to the marketing department. In principle, this gives a better understanding of the behavior of consumers, competitors and distributors.

Marketing organization

The marketing department should become

What role should the marketing department play in the enterprise?

That is to say, most marketing departments have not fully realized their responsibilities, and they put too much energy and budget on trying to sell the market supplies that the company has determined in advance. Therefore, they are the actual promotion department, not the marketing department; they are the so-called 1P (Promotion) marketers, not 4P marketers. That's how marketing is marginalized.

Should enterprises move towards "customer-centric"?

The company's CEO needs to take a series of steps from a holistic perspective

Barnard's book, The Functions of Managers, starts with the simplest human collaboration, revealing the nature of the organization and its most general laws. Barnard defines organization as "a system that consciously coordinates the activities and forces of two or more people." He went on to demonstrate the three elements of an organization's existence, namely common goals, willingness to collaborate, and good communication, putting the essence of the organization on information communication issues. It is an era's pioneering work to use information exchange to reveal the nature of organization and management.

Marketing organization design is sales

The organizational structure reflects the links between the various departments of the marketing organization. It is a general framework or system that reflects the division of departments and the power distribution relationship.

Linear system, functional system and linear functional system are three typical organizational structure forms.

A. Straight-line functional system: The flow of powers and orders is a straight line that runs through the organization from top to bottom. Each subordinate has only one direct superior, accepts the command of one superior, and reports to one superior only.

B. Business unit system: a form of organizational structure commonly used by large western companies. It is produced on the basis of product or regional departmentalization. Each business unit has independent products and markets, implements independent accounting, and has independent responsibilities and benefits.

C. Matrix system: It is a combination of departments divided by functions and teams divided by products (projects) to form a matrix, a management

At present, the most common method is to divide the sales area by region. Salespeople in adjacent sales areas are led by the same sales manager, and the sales manager reports to a higher-level sales executive.

Advantages: rapid decision-making response, easy to establish a relationship network with customers and channels in the local area, regional concentration, low operating costs; easy staff management; market development, management comparison system.

Disadvantages: The sales personnel engaged in sales activities cannot be very professional; they cannot respond to the needs of national chain retail enterprises; the branch and regional managers have too much power.

Applicable enterprise types: The products that the company operates are widely distributed, and the products are similar; the performance of the products is not complicated; the number of customers it faces, the area is wide, and it is scattered, such as the fast-selling products industry.

A product-based organization model is a form of dividing an organization into one product or a group of related products. Generally speaking, products with high technical content mostly adopt this form of sales organization.

Advantages: Sales personnel are in contact with production to facilitate familiarization with product-related technologies and sales techniques, and they are expert sales.

Disadvantages: due to geographical overlap, duplicate work; high cost; overlap between personnel and service objects.

Applicable enterprises: There are many operating varieties, product performance varies greatly, customers belong to different industries, and industry differences are large.