Marketing Concept

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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:

A clearer identification of market opportunities and particularly the analysis of gaps (where there are no competitive products) in a market; 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 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 programmes are more closely tailored to the needs of each segment.