شش نکته کلیدی برای ادغام بازاریابی پروژه به مدیریت پروژه

From a conceptual point of view, project marketing and project management have existed for years as separate disciplines, each having developed independently from the other. In the nineties, evolutions in project management edged the project out of its strict time frame in order to re-position it within a strategic, long-term and customer-oriented approach. In doing so, such developments concur with progress made in project marketing over the last decade. This article proposes to bridge the gap between the two disciplines on six key points, thus structuring a conceptual time frame common to project marketing and project management.

In the large amount of the literature on project management, the issue of marketing the project appears to be of marginal interest [1] and [2]. Two main reasons can be given. The first reason is that many projects are developed within firms, that is to say they do not or may not need to be marketed. The second reason is that projects are bound in time and the vast majority of project management methods are mobilised once the go-ahead has been given to the project team. A recent survey [3] confirms this marginal interest for marketing. Based on an analysis of the relative frequency of attention given to body of knowledge topics of project management (44 topics were selected), in papers published between 1990 and 1998 in the International Journal of Project Management (IJPM) and in the Project Management Journal (PMJ), this survey showed that very limited attention is dedicated to marketing and sales topics: respectively, 0% in IJPM and 2% in PMJ. Things have evolved and widened approaches to project management have appeared [4]. These approaches led to refocusing the goals of project management to make them customer- and stakeholder-based, whether or not these groups of actors happen to be internal or external to the company. However, these widened approaches to project management began to take shape [1] without any interaction or cross-referencing with the emerging trend of project marketing [5] in business-to-business marketing. The same applies to the latter: project marketing researchers never attempted to take into account project management concepts and methods [6]. The European Network for Project Marketing, also known as the International Network for Project Marketing (INPM), a research community loosely affiliated with the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing Group (IMP Group), has only recently taken steps to establish a dialogue with project management researchers. This dialogue is more of a monologue, however, as it entails a review of the INPM’s possible contributions to project management [7]. This article proposes to bridge the gap between the two disciplines – project marketing and project management – using a meta-theoretical approach organised around six key points: the project, characteristics of projects, project cycle, focus of the approach, stakeholders, project origin.

During the last decade, achieving convergence between the two disciplines of project marketing and project management seemed rather difficult. Nevertheless, thanks to recent developments in the field of project management, the new century should pave the way for constructive dialogue. Table 1 summarizes the major points of convergence and divergence between the two disciplines and provides a basis for new and innovative avenue for research and managerial developments.