Marketing and Logistics Led Organizations

Bringing marketing and logistics together is a powerful recipe to gain competitive advantage, and this book brings right up to date the approaches required to enable this. Extensively referenced, the text is an excellent resource for logistics and supply chain strategists who are seeking to increase end customer value and reduce costs for the supply chain as a whole.

The book confirms the well-proven premise that the successful organization has to be customer driven, but importantly it uses logistics as a vehicle to significantly enhance a market orientation strategy. For many years logistics and supply chain were a factor of getting product to market, but this book demonstrates how effective logistics strategies can provide a competitive edge. Structured in a way to 'learn the lessons', in so much as the organization has to be unified, process-driven and focused on the common goal, [the book] highlights the need to be more dynamic, flexible and adaptive and that both marketing and logistics both have a part to play in leading the organization. It is full of case studies, examples and insights that demonstrate and validate the credibility of the book, but importantly it provokes thought and questions how to use logistics to deliver greater Customer Value.

Today's manufacturing firms are still all too often organised along functional silos, creating internal islands of excellence that in turn fail to create customer value. Robert Mason and Barry Evans lay out a compelling case for organising the firm so that it has five fingers touching the customer, and five fingers touching the supplier.

Successful marketing-led organizations understand what winning customer value comprises in their markets, but that's only half the battle. In this thorough book, Mason and Evans carefully map out for the aspiring CEO, COO or student of business what it takes to achieve the operational excellence required to deliver this value with integrity, and the key role that logistics must play in leading the coordination of it all.

Contemporary challenges of digitilisation and the complexity of omni-channels, rather than simpler, linear supply chains, require more strategic, integrated approaches to marketing and logistics. This is a timely and inspiring book that examines these challenges and their impact on the two key business functions of marketing and logistics. I highly recommend this book to academics and practitioners in these fields as a refreshing joining of research-informed thinking and business practice.