Marketing and Logistics — a New Area of Management Concern

Abstract

The developing science of marketing has gradually been extending the frontiers of its concern. The previous emphasis on marketing as a means of creating customers, identifying and anticipating market needs and building a franchise with the market place, has proved to be too narrow in focus. The pursuance of marketing strategies and the definition of marketing goals without consideration for their impact elsewhere in the corporate system is a recipe for sub-optimisation — in other words the effect of ignoring interfaces between marketing and other functional areas in the company is to produce disturbances elsewhere in the system such that total company performance is impaired. Nowhere is this tendency more noticeable than in the interface between marketing and distribution. This article suggests an alternative, integrative approach to the management and supply of markets based upon the recognition of the role of distribution in the company’s marketing effort and by the development of a total systems approach to the company’s activities. Marketing logistics is the name given to this radically new approach.

From: Industrial Marketing Management, No. 2, 1973, pp. 131–144.