Businesses and organizations do not always need a marketing director to develop a marketing plan. Sometimes an operations manager can do a better job.  In many cases, operations is better suited to develop a strategy and just let marketing do marketing.

Yes, of course, a marketing director usually has the experience to know what direction a business should go and what steps it should take to be successful.  A marketing director would know all of the catchwords to keep the CEO happy for a few quarters of the year.  However, marketing is starting to NOT influence how the strategy for marketing is developed.

After the business objectives for the year have been approved an operations director can do a much better job of developing a tight, time effective marketing strategy than the marketing director.  Things like the development of the strategy and the execution of the strategies are what operations managers are good at doing and will more than likely be slated to do anyway once the marketing director goes through their motions as a director.

So, why don’t more business just let their operations manager be part of, or take the lead of, the company’s marketing strategy?  More than likely it is due to the leadership not knowing the difference in the two positions.

It probably also has to do with the operations manager being pulled in to also doing sales for the company or is strapped with having to do the work involved to deliver what sales have sold.  Very seldom are operations managers ever allowed to do NOTHING but operations management.

Operations directors should be allowed to stay in front of the operations process to make sure everything needed for the product or service being sold is on hand for processing.  The operations management team should be focused on managing the process to look for more cost-effective ways to produce the product or services.

This is why you may be seeing more job descriptions for Marketing Strategy Operations Directors

When the operations director develops the marketing plan it is guaranteed to keep the strategy from stressing the operations.

Think about bring your operations director into the marketing strategy meetings and see how many problems are solved before they get started.  You would be surprised.

Let me know how I can help.