Market Orientation of Ryanair

Ryanair was established in the year 1985 by the RYAN family and has grown from a small airline flying a short hop from Waterford to London, into one of the Europe’s largest carriers. The company expanded and within 4 years it had 350 employees, 14 aircraft, and carried 600,000 passengers a year. It is currently serving to 26 European Countries with 148 destinations. It operates on 794 different routes daily serving by more than 1050 flights in a day. It has totally 169 aircrafts running for different routes with 5986number of employees working in it However, Ryanair’s costs rose drastically and it recorded losses of £20 Million sover four years despite its growth. Although consumers were continuing to fly Ryanair

Product oriented businesses focus their effort on the quality of the product and work towards having the best product, forgetting that individuals or customers have their own needs and wants. They have more research and testing going towards the product. On the other hand, market oriented businesses have the customer needs and wants at heart. They do research and testing based on the market and focus towards the customer. They understand that the customer is their boss and need to go out of their way to impress the boss. In a long time, it has been known that market oriented businesses make more profits and are successful as compared to the product oriented companies (Helfert, Ritter and Walter 2). This paper will argue out this notion according to different authors.

Summary: Ryanair was founded in 1985 by the Ryan family to provide scheduled passenger airline services between Ireland and the UK, as an alternative to the then state monopoly carrier, Aer Lingus. It started out a full service conventional airline, with two classes of seating and leasing three different types of aircraft. However, despite growth in the passenger volumes financial problems were of a growing concern.

This essay will start to explore and define the meaning of customer orientation in depth. The marketing concept and the marketing mix will help discover after what it means to be a customer focused firm. This will occur through the scrutiny of the term in respect to product, price, place and promotion.

The main thing behind marketing in a business is finding the customer’s needs and produce the product/ services to satisfy their needs, this way the customer can choose what they would want included in their product/ service. A business that follows this rule is market-orientated.

“Companies with a marketing orientation focus on customer needs as the primary drivers of organizational performance”

“Marketing strategies can have a broad impact on the business in terms of instilling a marketing orientation among all those in the firm: the way of thinking or philosophy of the whole organization. However, marketing strategies can alternatively be seen as dealing only with the development of competitive advantages directly associated with the marketing function such as customer loyalty and distribution channel control. In the latter case, the domain is sometimes even further restricted by sole attention to the various element of the marketing mix rather than the more general issues of customer and channel relationships. There are two key

Ryanair, originally an Irish low-cost airline and established by the Ryan family in the year of 1984 starting off with only 25 members of staff. Replicating the American Southwest airline business model and then officially relaunched in the year 1990. It has vastly grown from being a single-aircraft family operation into one of the world’s top leading airlines. Now Ryanair has reached 11,458 employees. The airline carries over 131 million passengers per annum on over 2,000 flights daily, from 86 different routes, flying to more than 205 destinations in 33 countries.

Ryanair is an Irish based airline company, headquartered in Dublin airport, Ireland. It was established in 1985, and since Ryanair has expanded from a small airline to serving 90.6 million passengers. It operates 1,800 flights a day connecting 200 destinations. (Ryanair Annual Report, 2015; (Ryanair)).

            The Marketing Concept.  This is a business philosophy that challenges the above three business orientations.  Its central tenets crystallized in the 1950s.  It holds that the key to achieving its organizational goals (goals of the selling company) consists of the company being more effective than competitors in creating, delivering, and communicating customer value to its selected target customers. The Marketing Concept represents the major change in today’s company orientation that provides the foundation to achieve competitive advantage.  This philosophy is the foundation of consultative selling.

A market orientated company is one that organizes its activities, products and services around the needs and requirements of its customers. Burton Snowboards use market orientation because it is Customer focused. Jake Burton creates Burton Snowboards for the love of the sport. He practically invented snowboarding and transforms it to a world-class sport. The company focused in riders for its products developments and always wanting feedbacks from them to satisfy customer's needs and wants.

The aim of this report is to carry out a strategic analysis of Ryanair. This will involve investigating the organisation’s external environment, to identify opportunities and threats it might face, and its strategic capability, to isolate key strengths and any weaknesses that need dealing with. Finally, a SWOT analysis will be carried out to assess the extent to which Ryanair’s strategies are suitable to what is happening in its task environment.

In recent years, with the economy era full challenge, marketing theory and practice are accelerating the pace of innovation. Marketing not only has widely exploited in the economy and society field, but also more and more enterprises constantly innovate new performance, new competitive, new brilliance in unprecedented enthusiasm. Therefore, diverse strategies are adopted by most firms to discover and meet the needs and desires of its customers (Jobber & Fahy, 2009). Marketing orientation is one of the most successful strategies, such as the Apple company, it put to use and reap significant profit. Some specialists argue that product orientation can be used in all firms, while others debate that marketing orientation is more suitable for all products. However, several obstacles are faced by firms when they intend to move from a product to a marketing orientation. This essay will briefly describe that definition of the marketing orientation and product orientation, examples for some firms use marketing orientation and product orientation respectively as well. Furthermore, it mostly discusses key obstacles for if a firm moves from product to marketing orientation and give some reasonable solutions.

Since the beginning of mass production and the globalization of economic activity, marketing has continued to develop to an extent that it has gained a predominant role in the modern business environment. This is mainly because marketing helps the organization to establish a link with its customers since it's geared towards satisfying the needs and wants of both parties through the exchange process. In addition to being human activity, marketing basically involves various initiatives like product development, communication, research, promotion, and pricing. As a result of its predominant role in the modern business environment, the manager needs to gain thorough knowledge of marketing in order to conduct their functions in effective ways.

A company makes the policy to fulfill the need and desire of customers through out the products is called marketing orientation