The Marketing Concept

Nota:

• Corporate activities are focussed upon providing customer satisfaction

Nota:

• All staff accept responsibility for creating customer satisfaction

Nota:

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

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

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

Nota:

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

1. The marketing concept as an ideology

   Nota:

   • 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.
2. Marketing and society

   Nota:

   • Production of goods and services that do not adequately correspond to societal welfare. Customer satisfaction does not guarantee protection of consumer's welfare.
3. Marketing as a constraint on innovation

   Nota:

   • 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.
4. Marketing as a source of dullness

   Nota:

   • 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.

1. Product

   Nota:

   • What goods or services should be offered to a group of customers. Product development.
2. Price

   Nota:

   • 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.
3. Promotion

   Nota:

   • Promotional mix: advertising, personal selling, sales promotions, PR, direct marketing and online promotion. Target audience made aware. Internet has global reach.
4. Place

   Nota:

   • 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.
5. Key Characteristics of an Effective Marketing Mix
   1. Matches customer needs

      Nota:

      • 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.
   2. Well blended

      Nota:

      • Well blended to form a consistent theme
   3. Matches corporate resources

      Nota:

      • 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.
   4. Creates a competitive advantage

      Nota:

      • Achievement of superior performance through differentiation to provide superior customer value or lowest delivered cost.
6. Criticisms
   1. Oversimplifies the reality of marketing management
   2. Booms and Bitner argue for a 7-Ps approach