TYPES OF MARKETING ORIENTAION

In tracing the development of the marketing concept it is customary to chart three successive stages in the evolution of modern business practice

1) Production orientation- This era was characterized by focusing company efforts on producing goods or services. More specifically, management efforts were aimed at achieving high production efficiency, often through the large-scale production of standardized items. In such a situation other functions such as sales, finance and personnel were secondary to the main function of the business, which was to produce. More importantly, the underlying philosophy was that customers would purchase products, provided they were of a reasonable quality and available in sufficiently large quantities at a suitably low price.

2) Sales orientation- With the large-scale introduction of mass production techniques in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the United States and Western Europe, and the rapid world-wide increase in competition which accompanied this, many firms adopted a sales orientation.

3) Marketing orientation- It is unclear exactly when the idea of marketing or customer orientation began to emerge; in some ways the central importance of the customer has perhaps always been recognized in the long history of trading. Not until the 1950s, however, did the ideas associated with the marketing concept begin to emerge and take shape. The marketing concept – initially a US phenomenon – arose partly as a result of a dissatisfaction with the production and sales orientations, partly as a result of a changing environment, and partly as a result of fundamental business sense.

                          IMPLEMENTING THE MARKETING CONCEPT –

For a company to be marketing orientated requires that a number of organisational changes take place in practices and in attitudes. Market segmentation and targeting . The fact that marketing focuses on customer needs and wants requires that companies identify these needs and wants and then develop marketing programmer to satisfy them as a route to achieving company objectives. The diversity of customer needs and wants, and the multiplicity of ways in which these may be satisfied, mean that few if any companies are in a position effectively to serve all customers in a market in a standardize manner. Market segmentation is the process of identifying those clusters of customers in a market that share similar needs and wants and will respond in a unique way to a given marketing effort. Having identified the various segments in a market, a company can then decide which are most attractive and to which segments it can market most effectively. Company marketing efforts can then be tailored specifically to the needs of these segments on which the company has decided to target its marketing. Market segmentation and targeting are two of the most useful concepts in marketing, and a set of techniques has been developed to aid companies in their application. Some of the more important benefits of effective segmentation and targeting are as follows:

1)a clearer identification of market opportunities and particularly the analysis of gaps (where there are no competitive products) in a market;

2)the design of product and market appeals that are more finely tuned to the needs of the market focusing of marketing and sales efforts on those segments with the greatest potential.

There are a number of bases for segmenting markets, which may be used singly or in combination. For example, a manufacturer of toothpaste may decide that the market segments best on the basis of age, i.e. the seller discovers that the different age groups in the market for the product have different wants and needs and vary in what they require from the product. The seller will find that the various segments will respond more favorably, in terms of sales, if the products and marketing programmers are more closely tailored to the needs of each segment. Alternatively, the seller may find that the market for toothpaste segments on the basis of income – the different income groups in the market vary in their product requirements. Finally, the seller may find that the market segments on the basis of a combination of both income and    age characteristics .