Explain Marketing Concept and its types?

Marketing Concept is the base for Marketing Management. It simplifies conducting business, streamlines the steps involved in decision making process to highlight the hurdles, and helps in taking necessary steps to overcome them.

It is a customer centric philosophy that an organisation adopts to serve customers and achieve organisational goals.

Over a period of time based on the technological developments marketing philosophy has gone through major changes. These have been divided into Traditional Marketing Concepts and Modern Marketing Concepts.
The Traditional Marketing concepts- The focus is mainly on achieving sales objectives. There are three types –

1. Product or Technology Orientation Concept-
The manufactures believe that a good product would sell on its own with minimum promotion activities. “If the product is of high quality and reasonably priced, no special marketing efforts are required to place it in the market”, is known as Product Based Concept. This concept is highly successful in market where demand exceeds the supply. This got changed post 1930 when people were more aware of the offerings due to new entrants in the market. The management relies more on the product itself rather than the needs and wants it must serve.

Key points-
• Focus is on making superior products
• Focus on internal capabilities of the organisation
• Organisations so passionately involved with their products that they overlook the market need
• Needs of the consumers not given priority.

2. Sales Orientation Concept –
The management believes that effective selling will result in high sales of the goods it offers. Due to the industrial revolution in the 1930’s, transportation and communication system improved. Manufacturers focused on mass production because of advent of technology. This brought competitors to the market. Now the supply exceeded demand and manufacturers had to focus on meeting the sales targets. The purchasers was spoiled by the variety available in the market. The manufacturers now not only had to focus of making quality product, but also had to convince the purchaser that it is the best in the market.

Key points-
• Focus on robust and energetic sales department with an assumption that more goods and services will be purchased with aggressive sales techniques
• Effective communication channels opted
• Making products that are easily available to the consumers
• There is lack of understanding of the needs of the marketplace
• Practised when companies have over capacity and the aim is to sell what they make rather than what buyers want.

3. The Production Concept
The production concept focusses on high production, low price and ready availability. The production concept is one of the oldest concepts in business. This concept is mostly practised in developing countries where priority is availability at low price rather than features, and the competition is less. Organisations when need to expand the market opt for this concept.

Key Points-
• Assumption is that customers are interested in product easily available at low price
• Efficiency in production, low costs, and mass distribution mainly focussed
• Manufacturers make the offering available at low price
• Organisations upgrade technology for lower costs resulting is low price products and expansion in market share.

The Modern Marketing concepts

The focus is mainly on achieving end consumer satisfaction. This is divided into two types-

1. Marketing/Customer Orientation Concept –
This concept focuses on the consumer rather than the quality of the product or mass production. This concept begins with the customer. Deciding on which consumer needs to be met is given priority by effectively (smooth functioning) and efficiently (minimum costs) utilising the limited resources and skills available to it.

Key points-
• Rests on four pillars –
i. Target market
ii. Customer needs
iii. Integrated marketing – all the departments of the organisation work together with a common vision to serve the customers’ needs better than the competition
iv. Organisations objectives
• Belief is that sales depends on customers desire to purchase products.

2. Societal Orientation Concept –
This concept was greatly accepted all over the world in the 1970’s. Apart from customer preferences focus moved to social welfare as well.
For example, fast food manufactures started focusing on biodegradable packing, wrapping, etc. Automobile manufacturers focused not only on good vehicles but also worked on engines that kept pollution to the minimum.

The shift was considered as a duty of the manufacturer to awaken those needs in the buyers which lead to social good. The focus was not only on consumer satisfaction but also fulfilling the needs of the society as a whole.

Key points-
• Society and Individuals long term interest are at the core of decision making
• This serves 3 bodies – Organisation, buyer and the society
• Enhances corporate reputation, brand awareness, increases customer loyalty