Is Marketing a Process?

Is marketing a process or really a bunch of sub-processes that are part of other end-to-end processes?  I was looking at how to automate the different marketing functions (new product development, product management, pricing, research, marketing communications, and voice of the customer) and realized that most of these are simply part of a bigger process.

The process that consumes most of these is the lifecycle from idea through sales through billing.

Here is a quick picture I came up with to describe the marketing function from a subprocess view.

Perhaps you wonder why this matters?  Architecturally, it matters if you are building a system and want to connect processes.

Technology-wise, it matters if you want to focus on a SOA (service oriented architecture) approach where you can re-use components.

Organizationally, it matters to understand how data and tasks flow and how to optimize your investment.

Process-wise, it matters to understand best practices.

As I have talked about several times, the fear with any improvement is sub-optimization which often happens when you focus on a subsection of the entire process.

Here is a article to read on sub-processes (a little technical for some of you)

http://www.bpmenterprise.com/content/c070212a.asp