Managing Conflicts Between Marketing and Finance Department: Is There Any Way for Alignment?

Marketing and Finance are two key departments of any organization. Keeping these departments strong is crucial for the success of the organizations. Marketing department directly belongs to the final product, dealing with the customers, estimating the demands, work for stimulating the demands, managing the competition, and striving for brand building. Finance department, on the other hand, concentrating on the financing and investment strategies of the organization.

EVOLUTION OF MARKETING

Marketing functions had vividly evolved in some decades. In starting there were no separate marketing departments in the organizations. These were being merged with the sales departments and perform the simple marketing functions just to “push” the product for the consumer use into the market. But, now the marketing functions have taken huge places in the organizations in term of departments, and SBUs. Even separate marketing organizations has been established, who performs the marketing functions for other organizations. Marketing through brochures/sales materials, emails, social media, events, branding, advertising (print or electronic), and websites/SEOs become most popular now a days. Today, to set the marketing budget is ‘to chew the iron pellets’ for finance professionals in any organization. Organizations have to keep billions of rupees for their products’ promotional campaign.

WHY CONFLICTS ARISE?

Almost all organizations, regardless of their size, have one common objective, i.e. to generate money or to earn profit that should be sufficient for their survival and growth. But unfortunately inter -organizational conflicts wipe out this ultimate objective. In most organizations, focus diverts from organization level to the divisional or departmental level and the organization in there board meeting represents the following picture.

Marketing department blames finance department for their failure as the funds are not provided as required and the finance department revert back with the same argument regarding marketing department as they fails to meet their targets regarding demand stimulation thus declining targeted revenue. In the result of this, marketing department operates in its own limited area thus performance become marginalized whereas the finance department operates with its own priorities and limitations regardless of imagining the negative impact of this in term of loss of market share and off course revenue.