企业的市场取向-外文翻译

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COMPANY ORIENTATIONS TOWARD THE MARKETPLACE Material Source: Marketing Management Author: Philip Kotler Marketing management is the conscious effort to achieve desired exchange outcomes with target markets. But what philosophy should guide a company’s marketing efforts? What relative weights should be given to the often conflicting interests of the organization, customers, and society?

For example, one of Dexter Corporation’s most popular products was a profitable grade of paper used in tea bags. Unfortunately, the materials in this paper accounted for 98 percent of Dexter’s hazardous wastes. So while Dexter’s product was popular with customers, it was also detrimental to the environment. Dexter assigned an employee task force to tackle this problem. The task force succeeded, and the company increased its market share while virtually eliminating hazardous waste.

Clearly, marketing activities should be carried out under a well-thought-out philosophy of efficient, effective, and socially responsible marketing. In fact, there are five competing concepts under which organizations conduct marketing activities: production concept, product concept, selling concept, marketing concept, and societal marketing concept.

The Production Concept

The production concept, one of the oldest in business, holds that consumers prefer products that are widely available and inexpensive. Managers of production-oriented businesses concentrate on achieving high production efficiency, low costs, and mass distribution. This orientation makes sense in developing countries, where consumers are more interested in obtaining the product than in its features. It is also used when a company wants to expand the market. Texas Instruments is a leading exponent of this concept. It concentrates on building production volume and upgrading technology in order to bring costs down, leading to lower prices and expansion of the market. This orientation has also been a key strategy of many Japanese companies.

The Product Concept

Other businesses are guided by the product concept, which holds that consumers favor those products that offer the most quality, performance, or innovative features. Managers in these organizations focus on making superior products and improving them over time, assuming that buyers can appraise quality and performance.

Product-oriented companies often design their products with little or no customer input, trusting that their engineers can design exceptional products. A General Motors executive said years ago: “Ho w can the public know what kind of car they want until they see what is available?” GM today asks customers what they value in a car and includes marketing people in the very beginning stages of design.

However, the product concept can lead to marketing myopia. Railroad management thought that travelers wanted trains rather than transportation and overlooked the growing competition from airlines, buses, trucks, and automobiles. Colleges, department stores, and the post office all assume that they are offering the public the right product and wonder why their sales slip. These organizations too often are looking into a mirror when they should be looking out of the window.

The Selling Concept

The selling concept, another common business orientation, holds that consumers and businesses, if left alone, will ordinarily not buy enough of the organization’s products. The organization must, therefore, undertake an aggressive selling and promotion effort. This concept assumes that consumers must be coaxed into buying, so the company has a battery of selling and promotion tools to stimulate buying.

The selling concept is practiced most aggressively with unsought goods—goods that buyers normally do not think of buying, such as insurance and funeral plots. The selling concept is also practiced in the nonprofit area by fund-raisers, college admissions offices, and political parties.

Most firms practice the selling concept when they have overcapacity. Their aim is to sell what they make rather than make what the market wants. In modern industrial economies, productive capacity has been built up to a point where most markets are buyer markets (the buyers are dominant) and sellers have to scramble for customers. Prospects are bombarded with sales messages. As a result, the public often identifies marketing with hard selling and advertising. But marketing based on hard selling carries high risks. It assumes that customers who are coaxed into buying a product will like it; and if they don’t, that they won’t bad-mouth it or complain to consumer organizations and will forget their disappointment and buy it again. These

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are indefensible assumptions. In fact, one study showed that dissatisfied customers may bad-mouth the product to 10 or more acquaintances; bad news travels fast, something marketers that use hard selling should bear in mind.

The Marketing Concept

The marketing concept, based on central tenets crystallized in the mid-1950s, challenges the three business orientations we just discussed. The marketing concept holds that the key to achieving organizational goals consists of the company being more effective than its competitors in creating, delivering, and communicating customer value to its chosen target markets.

Theodore Levitt of Harvard drew a perceptive contrast between the selling and marketing concepts: “Selling focuses on the needs of the seller; marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering and finally consuming it.”

The marketing concept rests on four pillars: target market, customer needs, integrated marketing, and profitability. The selling concept takes an inside-out perspective. It starts with the factory, focuses on existing products, and calls for heavy selling and promoting to produce profitable sales. The marketing concept takes an outside-in perspective. It starts with a well-defined market, focuses on customer needs, coordinates activities that affect customers, and produces profits by satisfying customers.

Target Market

Companies do best when they choose their target market(s) carefully and prepare tailored marketing programs. For example, when cosmetics giant Estee Lauder recognized the increased buying power of minority groups, its Prescriptive subsidiary launched an “All Skins” line offering 115 foundation shades for different skin tones. Prescriptive credits All Skins for a 45 percent sales increase since this product line was launched.

Customer Needs

A company can carefully define its target market yet fail to correctly understand the customers’ needs. Clearly, understanding customer needs and wants is not always simple. Some customers have needs of which they are not fully conscious; some cannot articulate these needs or use words that require some interpretation. We can

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distinguish among five types of needs: (1) stated needs, (2) real needs, (3) unstated needs, (4) delight needs, and (5) secret needs.

Responding only to the stated need may shortchange the customer. For example, if a customer enters a hardware store and asks for a sealant to seal glass window panes, she is stating a solution, not a need. If the salesperson suggests that tape would provide a better solution, the customer may appreciate that the salesperson met her need and not her stated solution.

A distinction needs to be drawn between responsive marketing, anticipative marketing, and creative marketing. A responsive marketer finds a stated need and fills it, while an anticipative marketer looks ahead to the needs that customers may have in the near future. In contrast, a creative marketer discovers and produces solutions that customers did not ask for, but to which they enthusiastically respond. Sony exemplifies a creative marketer because it has introduced many successful new products that customers never asked for or even thought were possible: Walkmans, VCRs, and so on. Sony goes beyond customer-led marketing: It is a market-driving firm, not just a market-driven firm. Akio Morita, its founder, proclaimed that he doesn’t serve markets; he creates markets.

Why is it supremely important to satisfy the needs of target customers? Because a company’s sales come from two groups: new customers and repeat customers. One estimate is that attracting a new customer can cost five times as much as pleasing an existing one. And it might cost 16 times as much to bring the new customer to the same level of profitability as that of the lost customer. Customer retention is thus more important than customer attraction.

Integrated Marketing

When all of the company’s departments work together to serve the customers’interests, the result is integrated marketing. Integrated marketing takes place on two levels. First, the various marketing functions-sales force, advertising, customer service, product management, marketing research-must work together. All of these functions must be coordinated from the customer’s point of view.

Second, marketing must be embraced by the other departments. According to David Packard of Hewlett-Packard: “Marketing is far too important to be left only to the marketing department!” Marketing is not a department so much as a companywide orientation. Xerox, for example, goes so far as to include in every job description an explanation of how each job affects the customer. Xerox factory managers know that

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visits to the factory can help sell a potential customer if the factory is clean and efficient. Xerox accountants know that customer attitudes are affected by Xerox’s billing accuracy.

To foster teamwork among all departments, the company must carry out internal marketing as well as external marketing. External marketing is marketing directed at people outside the company. Internal marketing is the task of hiring, training, and motivating able employees who want to serve customers well. In fact, internal marketing must precede external marketing. It makes no sense to promise excellent service before the company’s staff is ready to provide it.

Managers who believe the customer is the company’s only true “profit center”consider the traditional organization chart-a pyramid with the CEO at the top, management in the middle, and front-line people and customers at the bottom-obsolete. Master marketing companies invert the chart, putting customers at the top. Next in importance are the front-line people who meet, serve, and satisfy the customers; under them are the middle managers, who support the front-line people so they can serve the customers; and at the base is top management, whose job is to hire and support good middle managers.

Profitability

The ultimate purpose of the marketing concept is to help organizations achieve their objectives. In the case of private firms, the major objective is profit; in the case of nonprofit and public organizations, it is surviving and attracting enough funds to perform useful work. Private firms should aim to achieve profits as a consequence of creating superior customer value, by satisfying customer needs better than competitors. For example, Perdue Farms has achieved above-average margins marketing chicken-a commodity if there ever was one! The company has always aimed to control breeding and other factors in order to produce tender-tasting chickens for which discriminating customers will pay more.

How many companies actually practice the marketing concept? Unfortunately, too few. Only a handful of companies stand out as master marketers: Procter & Gamble, Disney, Nordstrom, Wal-Mart, Mill iken & Company, McDonald’s, Marriott Hotels, American Airlines, and several Japanese (Sony, Toyota, and Canon) and European companies (IKEA, Club Med, Nokia, ABB, Marks & Spencer). These companies focus on the customer and are organized to respond effectively to changing customer needs. They all have well-staffed marketing departments, and all of their

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