Marketing Is Everybody's Business, by George Gresham

Marketing is everybody`s business, by George Gresham

A Reflection, by Tetiana Musiienko

In the article "Marketing is everybody`s business" author is primarily focuses on complexity of such concept as marketing and its importance for business success. This article shows, why it's wrong to consider marketing as just an activity or function of one department and explores cross-functional involvement of all Company departments.

This article can be interested for quite a wide range of readers. First, it targets students with economic undergraduate degree as well as MBA students. Indeed it can be interested for managers and executives of the companies, especially for those without special business education, who are interested in learning more about marketing in general and product development in particular. George Gresham in the article shows to his audience that proper marketing management during each stage of product creation and development leads to successful and prosper business enterprise.

New product marketing is critical because new products are becoming the nexus of competition for many firms. Author adopts the perspective of product development as a deliberate business process involving hundreds of decisions and lots of people from allover organization. In order to prove that, he walks the audience through the entire process of new product creation, development, up to its release to the market. In order to show complexity of the process, author starts with identification of new market opportunities. Further he explains that for success of development process new product groups should organized as cross-functional teams (including marketing, research and development, engineering, finance specialists). They should decide, what particular ideas to develop and how to get funding for those ideas. Author also points importance of numbers (such as sales, market share, profit forecasts). Finally, it's also crucial to monitor product's external environment for trends in the existing and future marketplace.

Author finishes his article with a general conclusion that even new product marketing is complex, but its payoffs can be quite high. George Gresham specifies that done right, marketing can change the rules of competitive engagement. Indeed he does not specify or describe any particular way of doing things "right", leaving that challenge to the reader.

Having read this article, I now better understand the purpose and complexity of marketing in the organization. I believe author was quite successful in bringing his main idea to the readers. I do agree with his supportive comments regarding role, complexity and importance of the marketing in general, and new product development in particular, for the success of every firm. I do believe that in variety of industries, firms whose employees quickly develop exciting