The Meaning of the terms Marketing Manager and Marketing Management

 Traditionally if a person had the title of “manager,” it meant that s/he had the responsibility to help guide the activities of at least a few employees.  While this terminology has changed over the years, we still consider someone who has the title of ‘manager’ to be responsible for overseeing the allocation of resources for the organization.  For example, as an ‘individual contributor’ I might have the responsibility of performing certain work (for example, writing marketing literature for the firm’s products), but not be responsible for the activities of anyone other than myself.  In high technology industries, the word manager is often replaced with “Director” to indicate that a person has primary responsibility for a certain organizational function.  For example, the ‘marketing director’ may be responsible for all marketing activities in the firm.  At other firms, the term ‘marketing manager’ would be used to describe the same thing.  In some organizations, the Vice-President of Marketing may perform the same functions.  The term Product Manager is often used in high technology industries to assign responsibility to a specific individual or group for the successful supervision of all marketing activities related to a specific product or service.  Sometimes the product manager’s responsibility is defined in terms of the product s/he is overseeing and sometimes the responsibility is defined in terms of a specific technology.  For example, one high-tech firm might use the title of Product Manager-Digital Systems to describe the job of the person who is responsible for digital versus analog customer solutions.  This brings up still another consideration. The use of titles varies across industries of types of organizations.