Organizational management and leadership

Marketing management usually requires leadership of a department or group of professionals engaged in marketing activities. Often, this oversight will extend beyond the company's marketing department itself, requiring the marketing manager to provide cross-functional leadership for various marketing activities. This may require extensive interaction with the human resources department on issues such as recruiting, training, leadership development, performance appraisals, compensation, and other topics.

Marketing management may spend a fair amount of time building or maintaining a marketing orientation for the business. Achieving a market orientation, also known as "customer focus" or the "marketing concept", requires building consensus at the senior management level and then driving customer focus down into the organization. Cultural barriers may exist in a given business unit or functional area that the marketing manager must address in order to achieve this goal. Additionally, marketing executives often act as a "brand champion" and work to enforce corporate identity standards across the enterprise.

In larger organizations, especially those with multiple business units, top marketing managers may need to coordinate across several marketing departments and also resources from finance, R&D, engineering, operations, manufacturing, or other functional areas to implement the marketing plan. In order to effectively manage these resources, marketing executives may need to spend much of their time focused on political issues and inter-departmental negotiations.

The effectiveness of a marketing manager may therefore depend on his or her ability to make the internal "sale" of various marketing programs equally as much as the external customer's reaction to such programs.