یک مطالعه تجربی از هم ترازی بین استراتژی های بازاریابی و تولید

It is widely recognised that manufacturing can be a formidable competitive weapon if equipped and managed properly, and that to achieve this success a company must have the correct alignment of manufacturing and marketing strategies. The authors considered there to be a need for empirical research into the effect of such methods within industry today. Their research was based on two questionnaires: the first was sent to 319 companies looking at levels of integration, the second to 20 of the responding companies concentrating on the development process and content of their individual strategies. Known models, internal integration and formal procedures were also investigated, none of which seem to be fully functional within any of the companies contacted. It became evident that the size of the company must be taken into consideration when formulating development plans, and that communication, cross-functional teams and formal product development techniques are essential to the success of any marketing strategy.

Intense competition in an increasingly global environment has triggered renewed interest in the manufacturing function and the contribution it can make to a company's overall competitive success. Since the seminal work of Wickham Skinner,1 there has been growing recognition that manufacturing can be a formidable competitive weapon if equipped and managed properly, and that one key to doing this is the development of a coherent manufacturing strategy which is in line with the other functional strategies of the company. In particular, it has been proposed that aligning marketing and manufacturing strategies can make a company more responsive to changing customer demands. However, although aligning manufacturing and marketing has been a much talked about subject in recent years in both academic and trade publications,2 little empirical research has been conducted to determine what effect this has had within industry. This paper discusses the results of empirical work carried out to determine the level of both strategic planning and integration which currently exists within a sample of UK manufacturing companies.

The results of the study indicate that although UK manufacturing companies do perform strategic planning, this tends to be at a business level. Where functional strategic planning is carried out, the companies tend to be larger. In many cases, functional strategies are not developed separately but are sections of the business plan developed by the Managing Director. However, irrespective of size, few formal procedures are used to develop these strategies. Instead a number of tools and techniques are used by a few companies, but the majority rely solely on SWOT analysis and management experience. With regard to strategic functional integration, although much has been published about the importance of aligning marketing and manufacturing to gain competitive advantage, this has not been achieved in practice. The strategic link between the two still remains weak. Where integration is achieved, this tends to be through two approaches. At an infrastructural level, companies view the use of cross-functional teams, common goals and aligned objectives as being the key to functional integration. At an operational level, many companies make use of several of the methods developed to help cross-functional alignment within the product development process. To conclude, while a degree of integration is achieved at an operational level, there is an urgent need for a methodology to aid integration between marketing and manufacturing at a strategic level which can easily be adopted by manufacturing companies during their strategic planning process.