Interplay of Business Functions: Unveiling the Dynamics of Marketing

This article shall examine shall examine the role of the different business functions, namely marketing, finance, human resources and lastly operations and productions. The article shall highlight the importance of each individual component and explore how they are interrelated to each other.

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as the activity and set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large (AMA, 2017). Authors such as Vandermerwe (1996) have pointed out that that value is created not by simply producing a product or service, but by how effectively the demands of consumers are recognised and met. In modern times, a robust and innovative marketing strategy is needed for businesses to push forward their products, especially as there is increasing competition in almost every sector, and consumer awareness is at an all-time high (Gronroos, 2006). Innovative marketing strategies like not even revealing the product is now commonplace, such as when Serena Williams endorsed a luxury watch based upon an unannounced mysterious comic book character (Sullivan, 2021).

Human resources is a sector which has undergone a revolution in recent times, and currently constitutes a central pillar of most organisations. Human resource management, a component of human resources is basically defined as the responsibility of developing and managing the human element of the enterprise considering their resourcefulness in terms of total knowledge, skills, creative abilities, talents, aptitudes and potentialities for effectively contributing to the organisational objectives (Wilkinson and Johnstone, 2016). Put very simply, the goals of human resources can be described as staffing, development and training, employee safety, health and satisfaction, and managing employee relations and morale. Traditionally, the role of human resources was limited to selecting appropriate candidates to be employees in the organisation, and resolving employee disputes and grievances, training and development of employees, and it was recognised that a robust and efficient human resource team increased productivity of individual employees, promoted better relations amongst the employees and decreased attrition rates amongst employees, which saved the organisation the cost of hiring and training new recruits (Mathis and Jackson, 2016). The traditional principles of human resource management are evolving to adapt to modern demands, such as managing more liquid workforces, which include lesser full time employees, and also adapting to the increasing automation and digitisation in the workings of organisations (Lau, 2020).

Production or operations management is defined as the process which transforms the inputs or resources of an organisation into the final product or service by employing a set of well defined, controlled and repeatable policies and practices (Rastogi, 2010). In simple words, in order to produce a good or service in accordance with market demands for the least possible cost and with maximum efficiency, the product management team would allocate appropriate resources to be processed by people and machines into goods and services.

In conclusion, for an organisation to function efficiently, it needs product management to have a product to sell, sound marketing to create a demand in the market, human resources to keep productivity high and robust finances to make the venture financially viable.

References

American Marketing Association. 2021. What is Marketing? — The Definition of Marketing — AMA. [online] Available at: [Accessed 11 April 2021].

Grönroos, C. (2006). On defining marketing: finding a new roadmap for marketing. Marketing Theory, 6(4), 395–417. doi:10.1177/1470593106069930

Lau, Y., 2020. Council Post: Rethinking The Role Of Human Resources In The Future Of Work. [online] Forbes. Available at: [Accessed 11 April 2021].

Mathis, R.L. and Jackson, J.H., 2006. Human resource management. Jakarta: Salemba Empat, 81.

Rastogi, M.K., 2010. Production and operation management. Laxmi Publications, Ltd.

Sullivan, P., 2021. Without Parties, There’s No Place to Show Off That Expensive Watch. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: [Accessed 11 April 2021].

Vandermerwe, S., 1996. Becoming a customer “owning” corporation. Long Range Planning, 29(6), pp.770-782.

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