MARKET-MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATION
MARKET-MANAGEMENT
ORGANIZATION
Canon sells fax machines to consumer, business, and
government markets. Nippon Steel sells to the railroad, construction, and
public utility industries. When customers fall into different user groups with
distinct buying preferences and practices, a market-management organization is
desirable. Market managers supervise several market-development managers,
market specialists, or industry specialists and draw on functional services as
needed. Market managers of important markets might even have functional
specialists reporting to them. Market managers are staff (not line) people,
with duties like those of product managers. They develop long-range and annual
plans for their markets and are judged by their market’s growth and profitability.
Because this system organizes marketing activity to meet the needs of distinct
customer groups, it shares many advantages and disadvantages of
product-management systems. Many companies are reorganizing along market lines
and becoming market-centered organizations. Xerox converted from geographic
selling to selling by industry, as did IBM and Hewlett-Packard. When a close
relationship is advantageous, such as when customers have diverse and complex
requirements and buy an integrated bundle of products and services, a
customer-management organization, which deals with individual customers rather
than the mass market or even market segments, should prevail. One study showed
that companies organized by customer groups reported much higher accountability
for the overall quality of relationships and employees’ freedom to take actions
to satisfy individual customers.
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