Il sistema di controllo per l'area marketing: proposte operative

In recent times, the relevance that marketing has taken on in modern organisations has led scholars to study how management control systems can support marketing decision making processes. Often, attention has been paid to new control tools rather than to the re-examination of ordinary tools by which management control systems normally act. Given this lack of contributions, the article is focused on the design of a system of targets and indicators able to support the marketing managers. The marketing area acts on three different levels (corporate, business unit and operational) and each level implies different activities and, as a consequence, different targets. Starting from this assumption, a control system in which targets are set on the basis of these levels with different degrees of specificity is suggested. At the same time, the idea that the marketing performance is influenced by both the internal and the external environment, as well as by the performance reached at the corporate, business unit and operational level leads to a consideration of the role that different indicators can play within a control system designed and implemented to support the marketing decision makers. In this view, the co-existence of leading and lagging indicators can be relevant to anticipate the effects that a negative performance at the operational level can have on the marketing performance at the corporate level. The reflections are not aimed at providing best practices concerning how management control systems can support marketing information needs, but rather, they have been developed using the specialized literature as a starting point from which they could be deepened, from a theoretical and an empirical standpoint, in the future.