Information control and the power and politics of marketing

Abstract The key environmental boundary-spanning role of marketing departments in organizations has been recognized descriptively by a number of marketing analysts. However, relatively little has been considered of the implications of this information-processing role for the political structure of the organization, or for the power of the marketing department. Empirical evidence concerned with the relationship between the control of information access and the power of the marketing department is presented in this paper. These empirical data are drawn from a sample of 140 medium- and large-sized manufacturing companies in the United Kingdom. Key findings relate to the restriction of marketing information flow by marketing departments in the sample companies. This phenomenon is related positively to the perceived/participative power of marketing departments and to corporate politicization, but negatively to the access gained by marketing departments to corporate information sources, and also negatively to the positional power of the marketing department. These last relationships suggest a possible substitution effect between formal power and the politics of information restriction by marketing departments. These findings lead to the identification of both a research agenda for the study of information management in marketing and a number of practical implications for marketing management.