This is a follow up to my last post, which introduced my search for a picture of how marketing functions work together. I have yet to find a great representation but I do want to share some of my thinking. When I started researching  what other people have drawn up to understand marketing I came across an interesting diagram from the Handbook of Public Relations by Robert Lawrence Heath, which uses a Venn diagram to illustrate how marketing, advertising, marketing communications, and public relations relate to each other:

Though I find this diagram dated, in light of the advent of social media, I think the impulse behind it is right on. Today I see the public relations circle collapsing into the marketing communications circle, while the advertising circle is shrinking. Of course, this diagram really only represents outbound marketing activities so it doesn’t give a full picture of marketing.

In my last post I talked about trying to pull apart marketing roles from marketing activities. As I explored this more, I made the following drawing to think about the high-level roles and how they relate to each other:

From there, I tried to tie these roles to the activities I wrote up in my last post:

• Chief Marketing Officer: Oversight & Management
  • departmental budgeting and management
  • chief community advocate
  • business development
• Director Marketing Strategy: Research, Analysis & Reporting
  • market research
  • brand and knowledge management (with communications group)
  • customer/community relationship management (with communications group)
  • planning
  • pricing (with product group)
• Director Product Marketing: Innovate & Design
  • prototyping
  • testing and usability (with strategy group)
  • brand management
  • pricing (with strategy group)
• Director Marketing Communication: Foster Engagement & Ensure Findability
  • customer/community relationship management (with strategy group)
  • public relations
  • advertising
  • creative services

Though this is fairly high level, I think it shows where specific responsibilities might fall within an organization. The next step would be to come up with a representation more like the one from the Handbook on Public Relations.