A review of marketing-operations interface models: From co-existence to coordination and collaboration

Marketing and operations are two key functional areas that contribute to the success of a firm. By acquiring and analyzing information regarding customers and competitors, marketing can be viewed an external-focused functional area that determines “what” kind of products (or services) a company should provide through “which” channel at “what” price. By viewing this marketing plan as the “demand” from an internal customer, operations is by-and-large an internal-focused functional area that examines “how” to deliver this demand by using internal or external resources. Due to their inherent roles and responsibilities, coordination and collaborations between marketing and operations areas can be difficult in practice. As such, the conflict between marketing and operations arises when the operation's “supply” does not meet the marketing's “demand.” Over the last two decades, researchers have developed different quantitative models to examine the issue of coordination/collaboration in the context of marketing operations interfaces. The intent of this paper is two-fold. We present a unified framework for classifying various marketing-operations interface models that may serve as a guide to navigate through the sea of research articles in this important area. Also, by examining some missing gaps, we discuss some topics for potential future research.