Marketing Concepts (Orientations)

6. Marketing Concepts (Orientations)

Over time, businesses have followed different underlying philosophies about how to approach the

market — these are called marketing concepts or orientations. Five are commonly studied:

1. Production Concept — the belief that customers will favour products that are widely available and inexpensive; the firm's whole focus is therefore on achieving high production efficiency, low cost, and mass distribution. This orientation suits situations of high demand and limited supply, where customers are more concerned with simply obtaining the product than with its finer features.
2. Product Concept — the belief that customers favour products offering the most quality, performance, or innovative features; the firm's focus is on continuously improving the product itself. The risk here is "marketing myopia" — becoming so focused on the product's own features that the firm loses sight of whether the market actually wants those features.
3. Selling Concept — the belief that customers, left to themselves, will not buy enough of the firm's product, so the firm must undertake aggressive selling and promotion efforts to push the product to the customer. The focus here is on converting the product already made into sales, rather than first researching what the customer wants.
4. Marketing Concept — the belief that achieving the firm's own goals depends on first determining the needs and wants of the target market, and then delivering the desired satisfaction more effectively than competitors do. This orientation reverses the selling concept's logic: instead of making a product and then trying to sell it, the firm first finds out what customers want and then makes and delivers exactly that. This is the modern, customer-centred approach that the rest of this chapter has been describing.
5. Societal Marketing Concept — an extension of the marketing concept which holds that a firm should satisfy the needs and wants of its target market in a way that also preserves or improves the well-being of society and the environment as a whole, not just the immediate buyer's satisfaction and the firm's profit. Under this concept a business considers, alongside customer satisfaction and company profit, the long-term interest of society — for example, avoiding environmentally harmful packaging, or ensuring a product is genuinely safe to use.