BRIDGING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN LOGISTICS AND MARKETING: FACILITATING COLLABORATIVE BEHAVIOR
✍ Scribed by Alexander E. Ellinger; Scott B. Keller; John D. Hansen
- Book ID
- 102288676
- Publisher
- Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
- Year
- 2006
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 122 KB
- Volume
- 27
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0735-3766
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Logisticians and marketers must work together effectively to leverage service operations for competitive advantage (Bartels 1983;Bowersox, Mentzer, and Speh 1995;Felton 1959;Mentzer, Gomes, and Krapfel Jr. 1989). However, in many organizations, overlapping functional responsibilities and diverse departmental priorities continue to make service failure a distinct possibility whenever customer order fulfillment entails crossing functional boundaries (Kingman-Brundage, George, and Bowen 1995;Shapiro, Rangan, and Sviokla 2004). Within firms, logistics and marketing are often separate and distinct from one another with functional managers tending not to collaborate or coordinate activities (Flint and Mentzer 2000;Johnson and Borger 1977;Murphy and Poist 1996;Stock 1990). Indeed, although logisticians' ongoing familiarity with customer requirements may create significant value by helping marketers to better understand and anticipate customers' changing service needs, Flint and Mentzer (2000, p. 40) state that they "have yet to find evidence of logisticians practicing these kinds of activities on a regular basis."
Inter-functional collaboration is difficult to implement (Hansen and Nohria 2004;Nunes and Cespedes 2003), poorly understood (Hansen and Nohria 2004;Tjosvold, Dann, and Wong 1992) and markedly rare (Hitt, Hoskisson, and Nixon 1993;Sabath and Fontanella 2002). The relative scarcity of collaborative behavior may be partly attributable to senior management's lack of involvement, as Hammer (2004, p.80) contends that most senior-level managers are "ignorant about service operations and uninterested in learning more about them." Although recent empirical studies indicate that successful intra-firm collaboration is strongly associated with successful inter-firm collaboration (Gimenez and Ventura 2003;Stank, Daugherty, and Keller 2001), there remains a compelling need to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the behavioral factors that facilitate (or inhibit) inter-functional collaboration.
Previous studies on integration between logistics and marketing have been predominantly survey-based. There is a shortage of research that evaluates and describes individuals' experiences of interacting with personnel from the other function. Accordingly, the purpose of our study was to use a descriptive, interview-based approach to dig deeper for nuances and insights about how logisticians and marketers in business-to-business settings respond to each other such insights cannot be adequately captured with survey-based research and have not been previously explored qualitatively.
The Critical Incident Technique (CIT) (Flanagan 1954) was employed in response to calls for research developing a deeper understanding of how logisticians and marketers view each other (Flint and Mentzer 2000) and of behavioral factors that influence collaborative interaction between the two functions (Ellinger 2000;Ellinger, Daugherty, and Keller 2000). Although rarely found in the logistics literature, the CIT has been used in other service-related contexts over the past decade, and is regarded as having been instrumental in advancing understanding of a variety of issues (Gremler 2004). Thus, as firms become increasingly dependent on boundary-spanning operations for the provision of customer value, our description of logistician and marketer interaction may help practitioners and academicians better understand dynamics associated with the design of innovative service delivery processes focused on customer needs rather than functional priorities.
BACKGROUND
Calls to more effectively integrate logistics and marketing can be traced back to Converse (1958) who argued that splintering marketing into two distinct functions was counterproductive, to Felton (1959) who suggested that the coordination of all marketing functions is critical to the implementation of the marketing concept, and to Andersen, Dommermuth, and Marks (1967) who insisted that promotion and distribution are inseparable and therefore their activities should be coordinated. Over the last decade, a steady stream of research has highlighted the need to increase levels of inter-functional collaboration between logistics and marketing due to its positive influence on service-related performance (Ellinger