Organisation structure of marketing department in customer-oriented hospitality enterprises

The concept of market-orientation has become a focus of academic researches intensively especially after 1990s in consequence of the evolution of marketing concept as a critical strategy to develop the performance and the competitive advantage of a company. Both implementations in companies and theoritical findings have had the market-orientation concept to be analyzed from various aspects, including determining its components and diversifying the levels of its implementation and concentration. Several academic researchers and managers suggest that the most important component of the market-orientation concept is the customer-orientation and all the plannings in a firm are designed according to customers once the customer-orientation is accepted as a strategy. Customer-orientation is used as an important antecedent to cope with the competitive environment and to develop organizational performance.One of the main issues which the managers in a company deal with is the organizational structure after determining the customer-orientation as a corporate strategy. The acceptance of this concept and its implementation in different forms have supported the development and the use of the different styles of organizational structure, especially of those performing marketing activities.The aim of this study is to explain the information, opinions and models about the customer-orientation as a critical component of the market-orientation and the marketing organization structures evolved in parallel with the acceptance of this strategy. Afterwards, as an implementation area of these concepts, some 5 star hotels in Antalya have been precised and studied to see how the marketing organization structure and content has been established.The sales - marketing managers of the hotels which were chosen regarding some criteria determining their customer orientation were contacted to define the marketing organizations, the employee profiles and tasks in order to understand the role of these features on customer orientation applications.