Introduction

Research on the role of marketing in organizations has typically adopted either a functional or a cross-functional perspective. Moorman and Rust (1999, p. 181) describe a functional marketing organization as having “the concentration of the responsibility for marketing activities (knowledge and skills) within a group of specialists in the organization.” Workman et al. (1998, p. 32) defines “cross-functional dispersion of marketing activities as the extent to which functional groups, other than marketing, are involved in traditional marketing activities.” While there has been a tendency in the marketing literature in the last 2 decades to increasingly emphasize the cross-functional perspective over the functional perspective (Moorman and Rust 1999), each perspective and its potential combinative effects (Kogut and Zander 1992) has key implications for the marketing organization (Workman et al. 1998). More importantly, each perspective is rooted in the idea of a set of marketing activities being performed by marketing specialists and/or nonspecialists.