The Marketing Department’s Reputation in the Firm: marketing Assignment, SUSS, Singapore

The marketing department’s reputation in the firm

The role, effectiveness, and credibility of the marketing function within a firm have been the focus of scholarly research and practitioners’ attention in marketing, and both researchers and practitioners argue that the marketing department’s reputation has been besmirched in recent years.

1.Introduction
The role and position of marketing within firms has received increasing attention in scholarly journals and business magazines in the last decade (Achrol & Kotler, 1999; French, LaBerge, & Magill, 2011; Homburg, Workman, & Jensen, 2000; Leeflang, Verhoef, Dahlstrom, € & Freundt, 2014). Both academic and practitioner communities have expressed concerns that the marketing department (MD) has become less respectable within the organization and the marketing function has been demoted in the organizational hierarchy (Sheth & Sisodia, 2005). Several marketing tasks e including product development, pricing, marketing research and logistics e have been overtaken by other internal functions or outsourced to external parties.

2. Developing the concept of the MD’s reputation and its antecedents
Reputation is inherently an interdisciplinary construct, attracting research in fields as diverse as economics, management, marketing, psychology and sociology, among others (Ponzi, Fombrun, & Gardberg, 2011). Hence, reputation research draws upon several theoretical roots, such as institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), the resource-based view of the firm (Wernerfelt, 1984), signaling theory (Spence, 1974), stakeholder theory (Freeman,
1984), social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1985), and others, demonstrating the complexity and richness of the concept. Organizational reputation studies assert that reputation refers to a particular type of feedback received by an organization from its stakeholders’ judgments concerning its credibility, favorability, esteem, and attractiveness.

2.1 MD capabilities
Organizational capability refers to the ability of an organization to perform a coordinated set of tasks using organizational resources to achieve a particular end result (Helfat & Peteraf, 2003).

2.1.1. Accountability
Marketing accountability is the extent to which marketing activities and expenditures can account for financial and nonfinancial firm performance metrics. Departing from institutional theory, Park, Auh, Maher, and Singhapakdi (2012) emphasize that considering the marketing department operates within a social framework and accountability is the product of social demand, the department’s accountability needs examination in the context of an institutional perspective, taking into consideration, other internal stakeholders
perspectives toward the department.

2.1.2. Innovativeness
Modern MDs are increasingly expected to participate in the innovation processes of firms. The role of marketing is to deliver cash to the firm by satisfying long-term customer needs, functioning as the interface between customers and the firm; thus marketing appears to be central to the innovation process (Griffin et al., 2013). Since the innovation success of a company is vital to overall business outcomes (Rubera & Kirca, 2012), an innovative MD significantly contributing to this critical objective will be more likely be favorably evaluated by other departments and upper echelons in the organization.

2.1.3. Customer connection
The marketing literature has long advocated the importance of the customer-connecting role of the department for competitive advantage and the positive impact of marketing within the firm (Day, 1994; Moorman & Rust, 1999). Departing from Day’s (1994) seminal work, Krasnikov and Jayachandran (2008) positioned customer connection as a key capability of marketing, defining it as a firm’s ability to understand and forecast customer needs better than its competitors and to effectively link its offerings to customers. Since market and customer knowledge is a critical resource for the whole organization, the MD can improve its reputation by holding and mastering this vital organizational resource.

3. The MD’s reputation and market performance

The resource-based view (RBV) suggests that having distinctive or superior capabilities and resources in relation to the competition is the basis for competitive advantage (e.g., Peteraf, 1993; Wernerfelt, 1984). Therefore, the key to sustainable competitive advantage is the possession of value-producing, intangible resources, and capabilities that are rare, valuable, nonsubstitutable, and inimitable. From this perspective, reputation is a valuable and rare intangible resource because it is difficult to imitate (Walker,
2010; Whetten & Mackey, 2002).