Is Marketing Still Part of Supply Chain Management, and Should Marketing Academics and Practitioners Care?

Over the last twenty years, there has been a shift in emphasis in many colleges of business to incorporate Supply Chain Management (SCM). The questions of how to include this material and who are the responsible parties to deliver it impact the focus, depth and topics included in the SCM material. Since true SCM is boundary spanning in both academic and practitioner arenas, it is an important question to examine the role of Marketing in the overall process.

Over the past twenty years Supply Chain Management (SCM) has exploded as both an academic field of study and a critical competency for success in the modern competitive business landscape. From it’s original conceptualizations (see Mentzer et al, 2001), Marketing has been seen as a core component of SCM. However, in recent years Marketing appears to be play a smaller and smaller role in SCM theory and practice. In fact, in most universities SCM is far more aligned with Operations Management than with Marketing. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this evolution in the concept and practice of SCM and to offer a series of questions to guide future research in exploring these trends.