Temporal variation and conflict in integrating traditional and E-marketing activities

Marketing practices increasingly change by the use and potential of the internet . Therefore, companies have to adapt their marketing practices to these changes which often implies the integration of online driven and traditional ways of practicing marketing. This research focuses on these integration efforts, known as inter-functional coordination. The importance of inter-functional coordination lies in the fact that alignment between organizational functions is necessary for creating value for the customer. To obtain new insights on the integration of functions, this research focuses on developing a better understanding on the role of inter-functional conflicts in the integration of functions, and studying this from a temporal perspective. Starting with a literature review resulted in a theoretical framework in which literature on inter-functional coordination is combined with literature on temporal structures. A temporal structure of a team is formed by the time perspective of that specific team. The time perspective is related to time aspects like an event or clock-based view on time, deadlines, booking hours, time pressure and the way of planning. The current literature shows that there has already been a lot of research focusing on integration and inter-functional coordination. Nevertheless, the role of temporal structures in integrating different functions is not yet studied. Therefore, this study focuses on the role of temporal structures in integration by analysing inter-functional conflicts caused by differences in temporal structures between teams. This is important because the temporal structure a team or function is active in can have an influence on the activities a team is performing (Orlikowski & Yates, 2002), and thus can opposing temporal structures result in opposing activities . In this way, a better understanding on integration can be developed. For this research the following question is formulated: How can we understand the integration of digital and traditional marketing teams from a temporal perspective? To research this, an ethnographical case study is conducted in which semi-structured interviews are used as the main data collection method. In this way in-depth insights could be gained about the current integration between the teams. For developing a better understanding on the integration of teams the focus of this research is on finding inter-functional conflicts which impede the successful integration of the marketing teams. In this case, different inter-functional conflicts came to light regarding orientation, priorities, routines and lead time. Using a temporal perspective on inter-functional coordination resulted in a better understanding of the integration of teams, and the role of temporal structures in inter-functional conflicts. The opposing temporal structures of the teams showed to be the cause of the mentioned inter-functional conflicts, and in that way influences the alignment and integration of the marketing teams. So, using the mentioned theoretical framework resulted in a better theoretical understanding of the underlying reasons why inter-functional conflicts arise between teams, since it shows the role of different temporal structures in conflict and integration. Besides that, this research has a practical contribution by concluding that management has the important task to coordinate the temporal structures of different teams to reach integration.