The marketing Chief and the Chief Executive

PART III

Of course, the chief executive is not alone. He has staff,line lieutenants, and others to help him with decisions. He can insist, if proper documentation is not possible, certainly on proper reasoning from his marketing aides. Yet anybody who has diligently worked his way up to the upper echelons of an organization knows how easily the bodies can get buried, how easily bosses can be misinformed and even deceived by well-meaning subordinates taking fragile little liberties with the facts.

One major purpose of this book is to help two categories of corporate bosses- chief corporate executive and the chief marketing executive- to get better control over the marketing job, to make better choices regarding what to look at in marketing, and to make better decisions on what they end up looking at.Another major purpose is to help both presidents and marketing executive understand, in a more participial balanced fashion than has recently been the case, the pervasive yet limited role of marketing in achieving the corporate purpose.

The marketing department can do only part of the corporate job. To attract customers takes more than having the right price and the right pitch. It also takes having the right product. But marketing does not run the engineering department or the R % D department, which is generally where the products come from. Nor should it. Neither does it run finance, which has a lot to say about budgets. Nor should marketing run the plat, where product costs are generated and where customer shipments come from. And marketing certainly does not make mergers down on Wall Street, where a certain kind of action is. Yet marketing makes the sales where the revenue is.

This is a book for markets that is designed also for presidents- to give the chief of marketing new insights regarding the character and responsibilities of their jobs and to give the chief executive a modestly improved basis for thinking about their role in marketing. It is designed to help the marketing man do a better job in these troubled and changimg times and to help presidents understand more clearly their own responsibilities in the context of the corporation's marketing function.