What Are The Interaction Or Relationship Between Finance And Marketing Department?

It would be flippant, but not wholly inaccurate, to describe the relationship between the marketing department and the finance department as the relationship between fantasy and reality, or the relationship between the mouth and the brain.

• Roles of Each Department

The marketing department's role is to create awareness and desire in the public for a product or service. It is generally creative, speculative and expensive. The finance department's role is to ensure that money is spent, but only on activities with a guaranteed return on investment. As such, the marketing department's job is to show what might potentially be achieved if they had enough money, and the finance department's job is to demand that they prove the viability of their ideas before releasing the money.

Marketing cannot under any circumstances guarantee its own impact - it can only present statistical analyses of potential and probable market take-up if certain marketing strategies are applied. Finance is, by the nature of its role of custodian of a company's future existence, cautious with its funding. Somewhere in the grey area in the middle is the space where harmonious working relationships between marketing and finance are born and thrive.

• A Matter of Trust

Much of the relationship is defined by trust - previous marketing success will make finance departments more likely to trust in the actions of the marketing department on a given occasion, and therefore more likely to grant a higher percentage of the budget that department is asking for. On the other hand, unsuccessful marketing campaigns are unlikely to inspire confidence in the future that budgets should be allocated to the department, if it is unlikely to generate an adequate amount of revenue back for the company.

While the relationship between the departments works on this see-saw basis, ultimately, the relationship is defined on a company-by-company basis, and at a directorial level, usually between the Chief Financial Officer and the Marketing Director.