The most important competitive mean in industrial marketing is the organisational design of the marketing function. Marketing of industrial products can be seen as a matter of building up and handling complex relations with a limited number of customers. These relations are often developed during a considerable length of time. The buyer and seller develop during such a process routines for solving different kinds of problems which might arise, for example, in relation to agreements about quality, performance, delivery, service, financial arrangements, etc. This building up and handling of such routines imply that the firms involved interact with each other[1]. An important goal of the marketing strategy in a firm marketing producer goods should be to establish good interaction processes with actual and potential customers. We have in earlier articles pointed out that the organisational design of the marketing function is a key variable when forming these interaction processes[2]. This also means that the organisational design is a competitive factor of central importance for a majority of industrial firms. However, in many firms the importance of this variable is underestimated. A lot of resources and efforts are invested in plant, equipment, product development, and technical and commercial knowledge whereas investment in the organisational design of the marketing functions is on a much lower level. The aim of this article is to identify the possible marketing effects of a change in the organisational design within the marketing function of ASEA—an international supplier of electric equipment and compo- nents[3], with headquarters in Sweden. Both the analysis of ASEA's organisation and the development of the theoretical framework have been carried out at the same time. However, for practical reasons, in this article we have chosen the following structure: first, we present the case and then the proposed solution in relation to the actual frame of reference. We hope that this structure will increase the possibilities of using the developed framework in other practical decision situations. © 1979, MCB UP Limited
