Assessing and strengthening internal alignment of new marketing units: An interpretative tool

Business-to-business (B2B) marketing is a complex field requiring companies to put in place organizational units that are able to handle multifaceted interaction processes at the customer interface. Moreover, B2B marketing is characterized by high levels of technological, institutional etc. change. As a consequence, and in order to adapt to new market conditions, companies create new organizational units to take over tasks such as key account management, category management or social media management. These new units are developed within the pre-existing organization. Typically, these new units also display a high degree of cross-functionality since their activities are interdependent with the activities of other units. Hence, the question of alignment is of major importance. In this conceptual paper, we provide a framework for both scholarly research and managerial application. It is based on the concept of frame alignment and offers a lens allowing analyzing internal aligning processes for new B2B marketing units.