Conditions of Departmental Power: A Strategic Contingency Exploration of Marketing’s Customer Connecting Role

The marketing department’s power is an important topic in current marketing debate. Previous scholars have focused largely on exploring its capability-related and contingency-related antecedents, its dispersion, and its performance implications. Customer connection, as a critical organizational capability, has been related to increasing marketing’s power. However, this capability has seen equivocal results as a source of power. For instance, Moorman and Rust (1999) confirm its relevance to the emergence of marketing power, while Verhoef and Leeflang (2009) do not. The mixed results indicate that different context factors must be at work and they underscore the need to explore contextual moderators (e.g., Verhoef et al., 2011). As marketing literature has mostly neglected the close link between Resource Dependence Theory (RDT) and Strategic Contingency Theory (SCT), our study advances previous work by combining RDT and SCT to argue that the relationship between power sources and power is contingent on context factors. Based on RDT, the customer connection capability represents a critical resource to firm success, so that firm’s depend on marketing’s customer-connecting role and marketing thus gains power. According to SCT, however, this relationship is additionally affected by contextual circumstances under which capabilities like customer connection are enhanced or hindered to function as sources of power. The study develops and tests a model based on Yan and Gray’s (2001) framework comprising of six context factors—asset specificity, selection and training, market orientation, environmental dynamism, differentiation strategy, and political skill of the head of marketing—that affect the availability of alternatives and strategic importance of resources like the customer connection capability.