The Basic Functions Of Management
Management is a process of combining all available resources to meet desired results. The role of management in modern history is clearly defined and continues to evolve significantly (Dobson and Starkey 2004). The process of management involves planning, organizing, leading, and monitoring. Components in an industry play specific roles to ensure that management is done successfully. The process involves creation of opportunities and ensuring that the entity takes advantage of these chances for improvement. The main functions of management are planning, leading, organizing, and controlling. Each of the functions helps modern organizations to allocate resources and establish performance standards.
Planning is crucial function of management because it determines future direction of the organization. Effective allocation can only be achieved, however, through planned behavior. By enabling the conservation and allocation of human and physical resources, marketing planning provides the basic means for designing the marketing mix, implementing marketing programs, and establishing new marketing objectives. Although finance and production have long been planned, marketing activity has not. Often it has been performed rather haphazardly. The emphasis on planning of marketing operations (which is new, and has been stimulated by the marketing management concept) is now widely applied (Drejer, 2002). Strategic planning is concerned with predetermining courses of marketing action. It is based on both marketing intelligence and the assessment of opportunities, since it deals with the future in respect to both perspectives and operations. Marketing programming and marketing action are its major objectives, which are achieved through organizational implementation. Two general approaches to marketing planning exist: a deterministic or general formula approach, and a dynamic approach (Thompson and Martin 2005).
Organizing function of management helps managers to outline and schedule the planning. Organizing stresses that retailers should plan for change. It underscores the fact that plans are not merely the results of objectives, but that plans affect objectives. The goals and objectives can be changed, as can the plans. Changes in market opportunities, for example, result in changes in company objectives and hence changes in marketing planning. In addition, a company might purposely set out to change its marketing plans in the sense of improving them. Planned activity is goal-directed and achieves a more efficient expenditure of marketing resources (Thompson and Martin 2005). Organizing necessitates classification of a company’s goal or objective; but recently there has been a change in the perception of planning. A company first specifies goals and then develops plans to carry them out, thus being able to achieve the goals. Goals thereby determine plans -plans are ways of reaching goals. Another dimension of the relationship between goals and plans stems from the fact that an organization does not have a single corporate goal; it has multiple goals. Thus, a decision that at first appears to be a compromise among conflicting goals actually creates a major-goal (Ulwick, 1999).
Leading function ensures motivation and positive culture among employees. The leading goal is the weighted average of all corporate goals rather than a single goal. As the basic vehicle for matching ends with means, or marketing resources with market opportunity, marketing planning becomes the mechanism through which a company is brought into line with the external environment. Leading is an essential function of marketing management, which has a forward-looking, integrated, and balanced view of total action. Leading encompasses the perspective of the future, the types of objectives established, and the strategies and tactics to be employed (Ulwick, 1999). Through marketing planning, the fundamental strategies of the business enterprise are conceived on the basis of market needs, forces, and opportunities; and marketing is implemented as a philosophy of business operation and a way of corporate life.
Controlling function ensures that quality standards are met by the company and its employees. Since various divisions or functions of business are highly interdependent, marketing activities are also interdependent, and since manufacture customer relations are intertwined, programming becomes a necessary activity. Controlling helps managers to determine and specify the tasks necessary to carry out marketing strategies, in proper sequence and relationships, dictating who will perform each task, how it will be done, the resources needed, and the time and target dates. It tries to allow for various eventualities and to map what might be done given each (Ulwick, 1999). Similarly, the marketing mix is divided into subtasks (goods and service mix, distribution mix, and communications mix) that are further divided for programming purposes. For example, programming advertising includes media selection, the allocation of funds among media, and the timing, themes, layouts, and appeals of the ads. These projections predict customer and competitor reactions; attempt to gauge acceptance for new products; and highlight economic, social, demographic, technological, psychological, and political changes, all of which are difficult tasks to perform -nor can they be performed with the degree of precision available in other more concrete situations (Goodstein 19). Information that provides a perspective for future operations is invaluable for corporate decision making. One of the major characteristics of the adoption of the marketing philosophy is that plans and programs replace haphazard marketing methods (Anthony, 2000).
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