But internal silo issues happen every day in the life of complex companies run by ambitious people. Perhaps nowhere is the family feud so great as between marketing and sales. If you are not aware of this problem and how it will affect your careers after graduation, Google the subject and you will come back with reams of articles about how these two departments that should be fused at the hips are at virtual war with one another. A recent venture capitalist suggested that if you could come up with a way to resolve the discontinuity, you would have a highly marketable product since every CEO sees this feud as debilitating his/her company.

This may be where the combination of marketing campaign automation software and sales force automation software can help humans bridge the gap. When these products are integrated as with Eloqua or Vtrenz being linked integrally with salesforce.com … you can see sales reps gaining a better appreciation for the role of marketing and vice versa.

Common automation tools will begin bringing us all together. The metrics these tools produce are transparent to everyone on the team and if the collaborative spirit is guided well, then the various groups within a company can finally stop the fighting inside and focus on competing externally.

Another example, we are working with a client building a huge portal site that will promote world peace and social justice. The portal is the central figure in this initiative. This is actually being led by the web automation team at the client. But an eZine we are producing for them is just as critical because it too will promote the cause of world peace, but it has as its primary mission to serve in a direct marketing to drive traffic to the portal. Everyone on the team sees the synergy instead of the dissonance.

Dale Wolf, http://www.PerfectCEM.com and http://www.wolf-creative.com.

We must be able to adapt and be flexible to accomplish what is best for our company. Some of our current feelings of annoyance, brought about by the confusion between marketing and PR students, will be quite a disservice if they continue to persist in the workplace.

This is an example of something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Direct Marketing and PR together can be used to accomplish a company’s goals.

The sense of it all is absolutely essential. Marketing drives awareness and lead generation. It does this by creating positive perceptions within the prospect and customer base. We use all sorts of media and skills disciplines to accomplish this. Where the disciplines fight for scarce resources or fame with one another, the program falters. My strongest counsel to students is to learn how to collaborate with one another. This is the fun part of the job.

To put it loosely, Marketing sees sales as a goal, and PR sees the customer’s positive perceptions of the company as a goal. Clearly the Marketing folks have figured out that the more we create a positive image of ourselves with our customers, the more brand loyalty, and therefore probably better sales.

I think it is a wonderful thing if everyone is happy. If the company gets more money and its customers are taken care through the company giving back to the community or its customers in honest ways, well, GREAT!

But honesty really must prevail or else it just turns into something sleazy and not at all following the purpose of PR. The knowledge that presenting yourself or your company a certain way can affect your public’s attitudes, and therefore their behaviors, is powerful and also lends itself to people taking advantage of that. The celebrities and companies who just do some things to make themselves appear as though they care about the community and their publics is what leads to characters like Samantha Jones on Sex and the City or PoweR Girls, and thus the negative stereotypes.

The blur is inevitable and is mostly incredibly useful. It has the potential to make everyone happy, but it also opens doors for manipulation.

People definitly confuse marketing and PR all the time. When I tell people I am graduating in PR, they always say, “great, that means you can probably do marketing somewhere.” I think to myself, why would i go into marketing, I just told you I was in PR. I guess it is hard for people who really don’t know how different the two are to make the distinction.

I agree with you that we will just have to accept the fact that the line is blurred and probably always will be. Does it really matter if the world knows the difference between the two? What’s really important is that we know what we’re really doing and doing it well.

Many of our marketing professors don’t see the benefits of public relations, and I think that many of our marketing students look down on the public relation students simply because their classification is in the business school and ours is in liberal arts. However, in many of my marketing classes, we discuss the same topics that we do in my public relations classes. Why the two are treated so differently is beyond my comprehension, but your post shows that the two need to work together, and when they do, the results are beneficial. The “blur� is a positive, in my humble opinion. Good luck on the reorganizing of the deparments.

Of course there are differences as both you and Nick mentioned, but I think the blur between DM and PR could be beneficial. Marketing and PR are complimentary, and thus both are more efficient and effective as a team. By not drawing a definite line between the two departments, they can work together yet still maintain some independence.