Elements of customer-driven marketing strategy
It is important to focus on the customers’ needs in a bid to get an edge over the competition in competitive business environments. A marketing strategy should be driven towards reaching the highest beneficiaries from the product or service offered. A customer-driven marketing strategy should include five major elements (Tunisini, Annalisa, and Roberta 308). The first element is targeting a specific segment or market. This should include the use of marketing research to define common demographic features within the targeted customer base, like gender, age, and income level. This helps to minimize the resources wasted while trying to reach improbable prospects. The second important element of customer-driven marketing strategy is meeting the needs of customers. This also includes examining how goods and services can meet the customers’ needs. One of the ways of addressing these needs is through offering free deliveries and extending operation hours to serve the consumers.
Thirdly, customer-driven marketing strategy helps to establish customer loyalty. The element leads to repeat sales along with adding referrals to the business. One technique used by marketers to enhance this element is the definition of reward programs where clients gain points after each purchase. Accumulation of points leads to discounted prices of products or services. An effective marketing strategy also includes the use of clients’ feedback to better products and services in a bid to meet their needs in future. There is the need to make any necessary adjustments and use the marketing strategy to make use of the customer word out to prove that the business is focused on serving its customers. The last but not least element is ensuring that generating referrals are inclusive in the customer-driven marketing strategy. Encouraging the existing clients to spread the good name of the business to attract new customers is of utmost importance. This can be done by implementing a referral program for rewarding customers for selling the business.
Marketing management orientation
The orientations can be defined as the concepts in the field of marketing that center on certain methods to define, process, and market products and services to customers. Businesses use the notions as a foundation of their marketing operations. There are five different management orientations in marketing (Hollensen 35). The first concept is marketing, which is based on the certainty that a business ought to produce, supply and market products or services more competently than the competitors to yield more profit. Marketers concentrate on looking the targeted market and clients’ needs as well as the marketing of products and services in a cohesive manner to implement this concept. Secondly, there is the production concept. It is one of the oldest concept. According to this concept, customers prefer availability of products and low costs. Implementation of this concept requires the marketers to concentrate on subsidized costs, mass supply and increased production efficiency and availability. Regarding the production concept, availability of product is critical because it is supposed that when a product or service is available for consumers to purchase, they certainly buy it, but when the product is unavailable, then consumers cannot buy it. This concept is predominant in underdeveloped nations because the customers are motivated to get quantity rather than quality of products or services.
The product concept is another orientation. It is founded on the credence that customers desire quality and performing goods that oblige people. To implement this concept, marketers focus on producing high-quality products with inventive features. However, there is a bottleneck of this notion where the marketers tend to be extremely involved with the product and forget the actual consumers’ needs. The selling concept is also an important marketing management orientation, based on the certainty that customers and businesses would not acquire products or services from companies without belligerent promotional and selling efforts. Managers, therefore, focus on selling their goods or services rather than creating what the customers want. Marketers also concentrate on developing an inclusive advertisement operation to wheedle consumers into buying their products or services.
The lastly there is the societal concept. It is also known as the holistic concept. The concept is related to the marketing concept given that the business concentrates on the interests of the market being targeted. The business also ensures that their supply is more efficient than other competitors’ supply. This notion maintains that a company business should carry out its operations minding and boosting or conserving the society’s welfare. This marketing concept considers how the company affects the society. Backing this concept, unethical business practices are not allowed on the market because all competitors should relate with each other equitably. Having competitors does not imply that the business should undertake negative actions affects other business negatively. Otherwise, the business can implement a strategy to lead in the competitive market. The five marketing orientations are correlated because it seems that one concept is derived from the other (Hollensen 73). However, the societal marketing concept appears to be the most progressive of all and most companies practice it.
Work Cited
Hollensen, Svend. Marketing management: A relationship approach. Pearson Education, 2015.
Tunisini, Annalisa, and Roberta Sebastiani. "Innovative and networked business functions: customer-driven procurement." Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing 30.3/4 (2015): 302-311.
