The Marketing Concept

The Marketing Concept

1. Customer Orientation

   • Corporate activities are focussed upon providing customer satisfaction

2. Integrated Effort

   • All staff accept responsibility for creating customer satisfaction

3. Goal Achievement

   • The belief that corporate goals can be achieved through customer satisfaction

4. Marketing vs Product Orientation

   • Marketing: Focus on customer needs as the primary drivers of organisational performance
   • Product: A business approach focussed on costs or definition of a company in terms of its production facilities

5. Market-Driven vs Internally Orientated Businesses

   • Market-Driven: customer concern, match customer choice with marketing mix, welcome change, innovation rewarded, efficient and effective
   • Internally Orientated: Convenience, price and product key to sales, ignore competition, marketing spend is a luxury, stick with the same, efficient

6. Efficiency vs Effectiveness

   • Efficiency produces goods economically. Effectiveness means doing the right things.

7. Limitations of the Marketing Concept

   • The marketing concept as an ideology
     • Assumed characteristics of an ideology or article of faith that dominate the thinking of organisations. Other valid considerations that companies must take into account. Achieve compromise between customer satisfaction and achievement of other company requirements.
   • Marketing and society
     • Production of goods and services that do not adequately correspond to societal welfare. Customer satisfaction does not guarantee protection of consumer's welfare.
   • Marketing as a constraint on innovation
     • Relying on customers to guide development of new products has severe limitations (Tauber). Marketing research ideas modest compare to 'science push' of R&D laboratory.
   • Marketing as a source of dullness
     • Dull marketing campaigns, me-too products, copycat promotions, marketplace stagnation. Marketing should create demand not reflect demand. 'Teased, tantalised and tormented by deliciously insatiable desire' (Brown). 'Retromarketing' - exclusivity, secrecy, amplification, entertainment and tricksterism.

8. Marketing Mix

   • Product
     • What goods or services should be offered to a group of customers. Product development.
   • Price
     • Represents what the company receives for the product that is being marketed. Production, product and place all represent costs. Discount and give allowances in some transactions.
   • Promotion
     • Promotional mix: advertising, personal selling, sales promotions, PR, direct marketing and online promotion. Target audience made aware. Internet has global reach.
   • Place
     • Distribution channels, locations of outlets, methods of transportation and inventory levels. Ensure products and services are available in the proper quantities, at the right time and place.
   • Key Characteristics of an Effective Marketing Mix
     • Matches customer needs
       • Target customer understood. Economic and psychological criteria. ECONOMIC: performance, availability, reliability, durability and productivity gains. PSYCHOLOGICAL: self-image, desire for a quiet life, pleasure, convenience and risk reduction.
     • Well blended
       • Well blended to form a consistent theme
     • Matches corporate resources
       • Choice of strategy may be constrained by the financial resources of the company. A second internal resource constraint may be the internal competences of the company.
     • Creates a competitive advantage
       • Achievement of superior performance through differentiation to provide superior customer value or lowest delivered cost.
   • Criticisms
     • Oversimplifies the reality of marketing management
     • Booms and Bitner argue for a 7-Ps approach