Reference no: EM13956431

Case Study - Woodvale Products Limited Karen Rees, director of marketing at Woodvale Products Limited, has called an urgent meeting with her fellow directors of the other functional areas of the business. The overriding reason for calling this meeting is that Rees feels her efforts to improve the marketing standing of the company through improved customer orientation is being thwarted by other functional managers. In addition, and as part of the overall problem, over the past twelve months since Rees was appointed there has been considerable conflict between members of her marketing team and other members of the company. One of the first things that Rees organised when she was appointed marketing director was an update of the product range, including the introduction of several new products. In Rees's view, the product range was badly out of date and this was directly affecting sales and market share. However, the battle that Rees had to fight in order to get the design team and the engineering and production staff in the company to go along with her ideas had been very bruising indeed. In short, they had vehemently resisted these new innovations. Rees felt vindicated now because the new product range had been welcomed by the existing customer base. However, this was not the only battle that Rees had to fight. Over the past twelve months she had battles with finance over pricing and costs of delivery and distribution, complaints about customer service, battles with personnel over proposed customer awareness training for all company employees which had been turned down on the grounds that such training would be too expensive, and she even had battles with the sales department, which was autonomous from marketing, over suggestions for increasing call rates by sales representatives on key accounts. In short, Rees was not happy with the way things were in the company. The company is currently organised on a functional basis, including her own marketing department. Most of the sales team come from engineering backgrounds and the company is strongly engineering and product oriented. At the moment, she feels that she does not even have the support of the senior management team regarding her views that the company needs to become more customer focused.