Marketing areas represent a flexible concept to help you structure your marketing data and activities. Whether marketing areas reflect organizational units, product lines, brands, geographical regions, or any other organizational entity, depends on how you employ marketing areas throughout SAP Marketing Cloud. Marketing areas can also be used to tie certain data and activities to marketing area authorizations.
In general, the marketing area represents an entity for which data access can be controlled based on user's responsibilities. One contact can exist in one or several marketing areas. Based on their responsibilities marketing users can be authorized for one or several marketing areas and users' access to contact information can be determined by their responsibility and authorization for certain marketing areas.
Let's look at an example:
The example shows how a user with access authorization for marketing area C can see the Contact 2. With this access authorization, the user is also allowed to segment contacts, as well as to create target groups and campaigns that have marketing area C. Target group and campaign are also both assigned to marketing area C. Only contacts associated with marketing area C will be segmented and included in the target group and in the campaign. Additionally, during outbound processing, a permission check is carried out as to whether the contact has granted permission for a given communication medium, for example, to be contacted by email.