As market competitions are getting intense, every company has tried to be a market-oriented company by gearing with the marketing concept. This kind of phenomena in businesses all come from the clear reason that if they lose competitive edge in meeting customer needs, they will not be major players in each industry arena any more. More specifically we have observed that many companies are experiencing failures in implementing of marketing plans and strategies, and furthermore we have seen that managers of marketing operations try to verify the real causes of the failures mostly from outside from the company, not inside. Namely they have never realized that the discrepancy between planning and implementing the marketing strategies are attributed to the lack of corporate-inside crossfunctional linkage or integration.
So in this context, this thesis is to answer the question; How to Implement the Marketing Plans and Strategies Successfully through the Crossfunctional Integration.
This thesis suggests the major research questions as follows:
1. What makes the company difficult in moving to market-oriented company?
2. Why and how much is important the crossfunctional integration to the successful marketing implementation and to be a market-oriented corporation?
3. What are the mechanisms of crossfuntional integration in the existing researches?
4. Which function among Marketing, Manufacturing Operations and R&D functions should do the leading role in the integration and why?
5. In the case organization, what are the current problems among 3 major functions and what integration mechanisms can be suggested for the practical application?
The major findings of the study are as follows:
1. Major obstacle to be a market-oriented company is the Crossfuntional Interdependence of the tasks among functions, so achieving the crossfunctional integration effectively is vital to the market orientation issue.
2. Successful Marketing Implementation without full supports and mutual understanding from Manufacturing Operations and R&D functions is not possible and the marketing function has to recognize the counter-functions' role expectations clearly and try to meet their internal customers' needs as have done to the outside customers'. This means also that marketing function's tasks have to be exptended from the traditional marketing process management with limited 4Ps of marketing mix and its new targets of marketing should be the internal functions too. Namely, marketing function should consider with equal emphasis both market customers and its inside-customers as new marketing targets.
3. The leading role in the integration should be executed by the marketing function because the marketing function is a Gate or a Boundary Spanner which connects markets and the corporate functions by acquiring market information and make other functions respond to the market changes. So the marketing function as a boundary spanner should do faithfully the market information generation and dissemination role for its internal functions' right decisions and whole corporation's strategic directions.
4. In the case study, the major causes of the conflicts among 3 major functions is related to the market information generation and its dissemination, so the marketing function should fully understand this and try to meet the new role expectation effectively. This is what the marketing function's leading role in crossfunctional integration in the case company. So in this regard, the most effective integration mechanism to the case company has been found that the marketing function should build up market information acquisition capabilities and should supply to the counter-functions on time and in time for the successful external marketing implementation.
