Marketing

Marketing is perhaps the most important activity in a business because it has a direct effect on profitability and sales. Larger businesses will dedicate specific staff and departments for the purpose of marketing.

It is important to realise that marketing cannot be carried out in isolation from the rest of the business. For example:

The marketing section of a business needs to work closely with operations, research and development, finance and human resources to check their plans are possible.

Operations will need to use sales forecasts produced by the marketing department to plan their production schedules.

Sales forecasts will also be an important part of the budgets produced by the finance department, as well as the deployment of labour for the human resources department.

A research and development department will need to work very closely with the marketing department to understand the needs of the customers and to test outputs of the R&D section.