A Report on the Marketing Function and Department of River Island

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Marketing Essentials
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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Task 1.........................................................................................................................................4
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................9
Reference List..........................................................................................................................10
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Introduction
Marketing is the set of activities and processes that provide offerings with greatest value for
suppliers, clients, partners and communities. It has a major role in the development and
expansion of a business. The study on business marketing essential shall explain the
arrangement of the marketing department, general idea of the marketing procedure, influence
of marketing and role of marketing function by taking an example from River Island. The
chosen firm is a high street fashion brand located in multiple locations of the world. It deals
with men, women and children’s clothing, their accessories and footwear (River Island.com,
2019). It was founded in 1948 in London, United Kingdom.
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Task 1
Explain the role of marketing as a function of the business, as opposed to marketing as a
department in a company.
The marketing function of River Island is composed of six activities that perform together to
target customers towards fashion and clothing products. It generally performs B to C
marketing by dealing with customers directly without the presence of intermediaries.
Product management
It involves developing, improving and maintaining retail product mix to identify the market
opportunities (Lovelock and Patterson, 2015). It determines which fashion or clothing
products River Island should offer. The quantity of products to be sold is determined by the
marketing function. As a part of product management, it provides direction for improved
marketing activities based on product lifecycle. Product development and up gradation are
the major role of the marketing function of River Island.
Marketing-information management
The process of gathering, accessing and evaluating information that can be useful for
business decision-making is another role of marketing function (Jobber and Ellis-Chadwick,
2012). It provides data about customer loyalty, wants, needs and customer satisfaction in the
response to retail business of River Island. The data on the effectiveness of River Island’s
marketing efforts are driven by marketing function.
Promotion
Promotion is the practice of communicating information on fashion and clothing goods to
achieve desired outcomes. It reminds, informs and persuades about the River Island’s product
ranges.
Pricing
It involves defining and adjusting the price to meet customer expectation of value and
maximise return. It sets objectives and policies for determining a certain pricing strategy for a
group of products. Sometimes, River Island requires adjusting the price as per the market
demand and competitors’ pricing, and this is performed by marketing function.
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Market planning
The company sets marketing objectives, conduct situational analysis develops controlling and
monitoring programs to execute marketing plan (Lusch and Vargo, 2014). It outlines a
comprehensive marketing strategy for a given period. Marketing function describes the
current marketing position of River Island through the successful execution of a marketing
plan.
Explain the structure of the marketing department of your selected organisation, and
succinctly explain a minimum of two different marketing roles
Chief marketing officer of River Island leads the marketing department. The department has
two sub-departments including online or digital and traditional marketing. Two managers
head these two areas of marketing. Traditional marketing manager heads three major areas of
traditional marketing such as print media, advertisement and public relation. Digital
marketing manager supervises three areas including content marketing, search engine
optimisation and social media manager.
Figure 1: Marketing Department, River Island
(Source: Created by the learner)
Marketing manager: Marketing managers of River Island oversee all retail-marketing
activities and develops marketing strategies aligned with objectives. They formulate pricing
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strategies by considering customer satisfaction and profit maximisation. They support front
line sales officers in lead generation efforts. They develop a budget considering return on
investment, expenditures, profit and loss projections and Research and Development
appropriation. They manage the advertisement campaigns organised by River Island.
Marketing managers organise major events such as trade shows and conferences. They devise
an integrated marketing plan and communicate the strategies to junior marketing officers so
that they can execute successfully. The major responsibility if marketing managers of River
Island are to handle content marketing, public relation efforts and social media platforms
(Mullins et al., 2013).
Social media manager: The managers develop and execute a social media plan by
considering all aspects of fashion retail offerings by the company (Neystadt et al., 2012).
They assist in brand development activities by executing social media campaigns. They
identify potential customers by observing online activities by consumers. They deal with
challenges such as insufficient website traffic, the decline in customer retention, poor online
reputation and slow sales. They formulate social content strategies by determining issues,
concerns and interests of customers.
Provide an overview of the marketing process, and analyse the importance of the
marketing environment to the marketing function.
Overview of marketing process
Figure 2: Marketing Process
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(Source: Feng et al., 2015)
The marketing process involves a series of activities that assist River Island in identifying and
reaching goals.
Mission: River Island is committed to affordable and stylish fashion. It aims to bring great
fashion collection to stand out from other players in the high street.
Situation Analysis: Its competitive advantage is driven by understanding the customer needs
and developing products that are central to the mission. The company carry out situational
analysis through SWOT and PESTLE to identify the external opportunities and internal
capabilities (Fahy and Jobber, 2015). This encourages River Island to consider present and
future aspects of retail and textile industry and design offerings accordingly.
Marketing planning: River Island is always first to the market with new fashion products. It
depends on brand allegiance from existing consumers as a primary scheme when beginning
new fashion retail products. Its primary focus is on young consumers, who can respond easily
to the newly launched products.
Marketing Mix: It offers a wide range of clothing and accessories and values competitor-
pricing strategy to set a reasonable price for all products (Ahmed and Rafiq, 2013). It uses
direct distribution model to reach customers.
Implementation and control: The phase starts when the marketing plan is formulated and
executed (Armstrong et al., 2014). River Island may require accommodating changes in
terms of redesigning a product or modifying the pricing strategy. Controlling ensures that
marketing moves of the company align with the customer needs.
Importance of marketing environment
Marketing environment has importance in marketing planning, as it pays attention to factors
such as internal company policies, budget, and external factors such as political scenario,
corruption, and dynamic Government policies (Morgan, 2012). It gets River Island to
understand the exact requirements of existing and prospective customers. It provides
information on innovative trends and competition among local and international trends.
Marketing function of River Island is able to tap and utilise the new trends to stay as a
consistent performer in the fashion retail sector. When the organisation gives detail attention
to the external environment, it becomes easy to identify the aspects having negative impacts
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on the retail business. This allows marketing function to devise strategies that shall mitigate
the negative influences and give River Island competitive advantages.
Analysing external business environment enables River Island to keep an eye on competitors’
pricing strategy, levels of customer service, loyalty programs and offerings and nature of
fashion product offerings. The company can plan new strategies to gain maximum benefits in
the market by beating the immense competition level.
Analyse how the marketing function influences and interrelates with other departments
in the organisation
Marketing function of River Island interacts with other departments to facilitate smooth flow
of marketing activities, provide customer support service and connect with suppliers and
customers. The data drawn from marketing research is transferred to production department
so that it can produce the desired amount of fashion products. The department decides the
packaging, labelling and logo styles that shall be used on products. The interrelationships of
the marketing division with HR and Finance departments are explained below.
Marketing and Human Resource: Marketing managers of River Island ask HR officers to
create a job description for different positions of the department. HR department conducts the
recruitment and selection process through which skilled marketing personnel are being hired
(Morgan, 2012). The managers take help from human resource to recognise the best and
suitable marketing staff. HR officers seek help from marketing people to help them in
identifying the best candidates from the retail fashion industry.
Marketing and Finance: Finance division of River Island determines the cash flow
projection in discussion with chief marketing officer. Marketing department reports the daily
expenses of marketing activities to finance officers. Finance department determines the
required budget to execute any marketing strategy and implement traditional and social media
marketing plans (Ganesan, 2012).
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Conclusion
With the completion of the study, it is observed that marketing function has some primary
activities such as product management, information management, pricing and distribution
decisions, marketing planning and others. Marketing and Social media managers are
important parts of marketing department, who give a new shape to marketing activities. The
overall activities of a marketing process include mission formulation, situational analysis,
marketing mix analysis, and implementation activities. Internal and external marketing
environment of the business gives information on new trends and business opportunities to
the marketing function. The functional divisions of a retail company work collaboratively to
serve customers and increase customer satisfaction.
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Reference List
Ahmed, P.K. and Rafiq, M., 2013. Internal marketing. Routledge.
Armstrong, G., Adam, S., Denize, S. and Kotler, P., 2014. Principles of marketing. Pearson
Australia.
Fahy, J. and Jobber, D., 2015. Foundations of marketing.
Feng, H., Morgan, N.A. and Rego, L.L., 2015. Marketing department power and firm
performance. Journal of Marketing, 79(5), pp.1-20.
Ganesan, S. ed., 2012. Handbook of marketing and finance. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Jobber, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F., 2012. Principles and practice of marketing (No. 7th).
McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Lovelock, C. and Patterson, P., 2015. Services marketing. Pearson Australia.
Lusch, R.F. and Vargo, S.L., 2014. Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. In The
Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing (pp. 21-46). Routledge.
Morgan, N.A., 2012. Marketing and business performance. Journal of the Academy of
Marketing Science, 40(1), pp.102-119.
Mullins, J.W., Walker, O.C., Boyd, H.W. and Larréché, J.C., 2013. Marketing management:
A strategic decision-making approach. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Neystadt, J., Karidi, R., Weisfeld, Y.T., Varshavsky, R., Oron, A., Radinsky, K. and
Tennenholtz, M., Microsoft Corp, 2012. Social Marketing Manager. U.S. Patent Application
13/025,049.
River Island.com 2019. About Us. [online] Available at: https://www.riverisland.com/inside-
river-island/about-us [Accessed 15 Apr. 2019].
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