For the last few months, an executive recruitment firm has been trying to fill a position "Manager, Commercial Purchasing & Marketing". I initially thought it an odd combination for a single position at that level.
I believe there are major benefits to marketing & purchasing working together. Purchasing has always needed to market itself to other departments to support their efforts, and purchasing can build its strategy early if they know the expected outcomes from various initiatives. Marketing also needs to build its strategy over time, thus making sense to have the two departments working together, but in my mind, they'd have separate managers, reporting into a single director or VP.
The two disciplines of Marketing & Purchasing are very different. Marketing appeals to the emotional side of buyers, builds relationships to support its company branding & sales. Purchasing builds relationships with the company suppliers but is to remain 'neutral' and cut through the marketing "fluff" to ensure supply is effective, efficient and economical. I definitely would want purchasing to understand what marketing's strategy, approach and forecasts were going to be for my organization, BUT, my fear of having a marketing person in charge of purchasing would mean spending my organization's capital & operating funds using the same emotions they use to sell the brand.
Am I distilling Marketing to emotion-based action and Purchasing to thinking-based action?
Agree/disagree? I welcome comments!
1 comment:
Coming from a recruitment background and having some experience in both fields sought (should I apply?), I can see where this comes from.
The recruiter's client may just be seeking to test the waters and save cash: "Here's our wish list and we'd love to keep this as one position."
Or they're trying to do something different than their competitors. "If we can do this, we'll have a leg-up because of...."
Or the recruiter thinks they're nuts, are spending no time on this apart from posting the job and will show now traction over the next week or two because they trust their competitors to come up with nothing, too.
I'm not sure this addresses your question, but I think (hope?) there's more to this kind of posting than what you see at face value.
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