Why can’t marketing and research and development play nice?

Both functions are essential to developing successful new products. But the two departments don’t get along nearly as well as senior management thinks.

How big is the gap? Huge. According to a survey we conducted, some 69% of senior managers described relations between marketing and R&D as collegial, but only 34% of mid-level managers saw the relationship that way.

When we asked staff in each department what they thought about the staff in the other, the comments were even more revealing. R&D employees complained that marketers give them poor data, that the marketing department is too insistent about certain product features or benefits, and that marketers are mainly useful in developing launch plans rather than in actually coming up with new products.

Marketing, meanwhile, had its own beefs: R&D doesn’t include marketers early enough in the product-development process; R&D doesn’t understand marketing, or what it brings to the process; R&D takes the credit when a product succeeds, and blames marketing if a product doesn’t sell.

Such complaints are hallmarks of a dysfunctional product-development process. Both marketing and R&D have indispensable roles to play, but neither can reach its full potential without the other. Companies where such divides exist are more likely to miss out on the kinds of breakthrough products and market-research discoveries that can drive growth and profits for years.

In what follows, we share our strategies for getting both sides to engage more productively from the earliest stages of a product’s development.

1. Make sure everybody recognizes the value that each department brings to the process—and how one side complements the other.

While R&D tends to focus on technical issues and hard data, marketing zeroes in on what customers want