Abstract
One of the greatest gaps in our knowledge of how marketing decisions for domestic and international operations are made relates to the impact of the organisational setting in which most decision‐making takes place. While the concept of the marketing environment — all those impinging forces in the international marketplace outside the firm — is familiar, this article introduces and makes use of the idea of the corporate environment — the organisational forces and conditions surrounding the marketing decision maker. This corporate environment includes such elements as organisational climate, organisational power and politics, and the use and manipulation of information within organisations. The corporate environment provides a way of explaining and understanding some marketing decisions which do not conform to the “rational” models of economics and management science. In particular this is illustrated by re‐examining the fundamental question of the determination of marketing budgets.