Marketing and the Customer Value Chain: Integrating Marketing and Supply Chain Management

Marketing and supply chain management have a symbiotic relationship within any enterprise, and together they are vital for a company’s viability and success. This book offers a systemic approach to the integration of marketing and supply chain management. It examines the strategic connections and disconnections between supply chain and operations management and marketing by focusing on the factors that constitute the extended marketing mix, including product, price, promotion, people, and processes.

Key aspects of supply chain management are discussed in detail, including material handling, unit load, handling systems, and equipment, as well as warehousing and transportation, design, and packaging. The book then goes on to explore the marketing functions of intangible products (services), followed by a focus on B2B markets. Throughout, there is a strong emphasis on the optimization and maximization of the value chain through the development of a systems approach with a market-orientation. Pedagogy that translates theory to practice is embedded throughout, including theoretical mini-cases, chapter-by-chapter objectives, and summaries.

Marketing and the Customer Value Chain will help advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students appreciate how front-end marketing can interface with the back-end operations of supply chain management.

Thomas Fotiadis is Associate Professor of Marketing and Director of the Marketing Laboratory, Department of Production and Management Engineering, Polytechnic School, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece.

Dimitris Folinas is Professor in the Department of Logistics at the Technological Educational Institute of Central Macedonia, Greece.

Konstantinos Vasileiou is Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Marketing in the Department of Pharmacy at the University of Patras, Greece.

Aggeliki Konstantoglou has a PhD in Industrial Marketing from the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece.