Measurement of Integration between NPD and Marketing Employees: Case of a Software Product Development Company

The relationship between marketing and new product development (NPD) is of great significance. It has been widely accepted that it also affects the success of the project or product to a large extent. But yet, this integration is not an easy task and presents lots of challenges to an organization. One of the major barriers is considered to be differences in the perceptions of marketing and NPD employees about each others’ tasks and the way they are supposed to cooperate. The study described in this paper is aimed at diagnosing these differences for a particular software products organization. The study has tried to capture these differences for integration behaviors between marketing and new product development (NPD) employees engaged in software product development. The study revealed that there was a significant difference between perception of marketing and new product development (NPD) employees over the current level of information flow from marketing to NPD as well the improvement required in the same. The priorities of marketing and NPD employees for improvement also seem to be quite different which is a serious concern as it can lead to lack of concerted effort in a particular direction. The paper describes these findings on the integration behaviours between marketing and NPD employees.