Towards Integrative Marketing Management: Deriving a Roadmap from the Integrative Management Approach

An ever more complex “VUCA” world requires integrative management and thereby an integrative approach to marketing management. Authors of classical management research such as Drucker or Mintzberg already assumed an integrative management approach. While their ideas are still relevant today, they nevertheless need to be re-accentuated in the light of increasing complexity and ambiguity. Today, taking decisions on marketing strategies and instruments is not only a matter of marketing techniques. All relevant external environmental spheres, including global markets, legal aspects, and impacts on natural resources or society with its different groups, have to be taken into consideration. Also, internal coordination within organizations requires boundary spanning techniques to break more and more closed professional communities and integrate corporate functions like compliance, finance, or IT. This contribution draws on the results of a multidisciplinary project on integrative management. It analyses the dimensions of integrative management and the role of management models. It draws conclusions for marketing management and the role of management models as theories-in-use for marketing.