Study Guide for Intro to Marketing

Market share is defined as companies sales as a percentage of total sales volume in a specific industry, market or product area.

A wide range of companies today prefer to adopt the marketing orientated approach to sell their new products rather than using product orientation before.In fact,marketing orientation also helps such companies to earn more profits in the long time.According to Jobber and Ellis Chadwick (2013),marketing orientation focuses on customers need as the primary drivers of organizational performance.However,this is not always the case.Product orientation still be used by some senior executives and this method can help these companies to sell more products and even acquire reliable reputation in the customers.In this essay,first the history of marketing concept development will be discussed and the specific definition of the two kinds of marketing concept will be given respectively.Then these two concepts will be compared by using some examples.The final part will investigate why although marketing orientation is very popular in modern society,some enterprises still adopt the product orientated approach to extend their new products.

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.

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 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.

In addition to increased sales, the company sets out to enhance the number of the overall customer share that they have.

Marketing plays a major function in any business organisation. The essence of marketing is about designing and managing a product and generating exchanges of value from where both the customer and the organisation can attain benefits. Marketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large (Solomon, Marshall & Stuart, 2009, p.13). Marketers need to generate the ideal mix of the marketing elements to meet the needs of their customers in their target market. Customer satisfaction is the key objective in the marketing concept. Marketing concept outlines that “marketing begins and ends with customers” (Pride, 2011, p.35). Marketing concept also requires the business to not only meet the needs of customers but also the goals of the organisation. Organisations like Threadless have developed unique marketing models to provide satisfaction to both customers and the organisation. Marketers are required to meet the objectives and create utility for both its customers and the organisation.

A successful approach to market orientation involves a systematic approach to researching consumer behaviour. Missing the mark in this process creates a system whereby the company uses ineffective data in its approach to reaching out to customers. Working with wrong data is often worse than working with no data at all. In short, a company that is very small, lack research resources or has high segmentation between its departments is at a disadvantage when it comes to establishing marketing orientation.

According to six markets model, customer markets are the heart of the six markets model. Galbreath (2002) believes value creation begins with customers as they have true economic value. Bhote (1996) describes the costs of attracting new customers are up to seven times more than maintaining them. However, companies should recognize the cost factors to achieve customer lifetime value and invest the effort in locating and acquiring potentially loyal customers. Loyal customers can be less price sensitive and make market entry difficult for competitors by retaining customer.

LO1.1: Marketing: is defined as a ‘business orientation whose target is to satisfy consumers’ needs or wants at standard levels of revenues and costs’ (Loudon et al., 2010, p.2) (Dudovskiy, 2014).

Businesses can develop new products based on either a marketing orientated approach or a product orientated approach. According to Jaworski and Kohli (1993), marketing orientation is ‘the organization-wide generation of market intelligence pertaining to current and

What is business orientation and which part of business orientation should company invest on? Basically, there are four different types of business orientations which most company use when deciding on how to create an organizational orientation named as product orientation, production orientation, sale orientation and marketing orientation respectively. A good company will know exactly how to mix their philosophy effectively by deciding on how to harness their internal strengths to reach their consumers.

Marketing takes strategy, a company does their homework to try to prevent failure of a product. They do the research to see which consumers may need or want their products. A firm segments its market so that it can respond to the wants of groups of potential buyers. It would be easier for the marketing department if not everyone had different wants and needs.

Market orientation is an approach by a business or firm that focus on identifying and meeting customers wants and demands. There are many market orientation used by a firm or business such as production, product and sales orientations to make sure their business going in the right direction and to gain high profits. However, nowadays market orientation has evolved and change from the production, product and sales orientation to a marketing orientation which is their focus change to the customer. Customers are a main subject or actor in buying and selling process. They will be determined factor in the direction of the firm. This is because the main reason firm produce or make a product is to fulfil customer wants. The firm will not gain any revenue or profit if they fails to attract any customers to use their product. In the end they will make a loss and needs to close their business. Consumer-centric model is about to create customers love and keep the customers close to the firm. This essay will explain the meaning of consumer-centric model and the importance of consumer-centric approach in marketing. Besides, this essay also will include reasons of evolution of market orientation and lastly, how consumer-centric model works.

Marketing orientation means a company emphasizes the needs and wants of customers in all facets of operations. Products and services are developed specifically to meet the needs of the targeted customers.