Understanding Market Orientation
I was recently designing a marketing course for a client, and I’m not ashamed to say that in doing so I dug out some of my old university journals to make sure that the syllabus included the key components of marketing.
It’s not that I don’t necessarily follow an established marketing process when approaching a clients strategy, or assessing someone’s success in their historic marketing, but applied marketing in real life, often means that steps which may take a long time to explain, in real life are executed at great speed.
I thought I’d share some of my re-established connection with marketing theory on here over the coming months, and where better to start than Market Orientation.
First, a definition:
A marketing orientated approach means a business reacts to what customers want. The decisions taken are based around information about customers' needs and wants, rather than what the business thinks is right for the customer. Most successful businesses take a market-orientated approach.
Essentially, businesses that are market-orientated focus exclusively on their customer needs. In doing this, it allows them to diversify their offerings to fit the customer need, rather than the businesses roadmap.
Market orientated companies are typically highly interested in data and market research – what are customers current concerns, their preferences, their needs within a product category. When we think about the most successful companies out there, for the most part, they are market-orientated companies. They are companies that have been driven by their customers' needs, rather than their own agenda of product R and D. This means that brand loyalty is high, as is positive word of mouth.
So, let's look at some companies who can be considered market-orientated:
Amazon
Beginning life as, dare we say it, a book market place, Amazon has come a long way by focusing on the needs of its market. Market orientation has allowed amazon to create:
Amazon Prime – their insight that delivery charges annoy customers, particularly regular users.
Amazon Locker – their insight that busy people who need to buy things online, don’t want to have their potentially valuable packages left out.
Amazon Alexa Ordering – That people are busy, even with a one-click check-out, being able to simply ask Alexa to order something makes their life a lot easier (though perhaps not when young children start speaking to her).
Amazon Dash Buttons – first real-life and now virtual – a short cut ordering system, quicker than Buy Now, Amazon Dash buttons let you have your favourites on the front of your app ready to go.
Not only does this show Amazons absolute dedication to market orientation, but it also aligns them to their mission – To be Earth’s most customer-centric company.
Coca-Cola
Another example is Coca-Cola. As a business Coca-Cola spends millions researching flavours which customers will like, and how that might differ globally, and within demographics. It’s the reason they chose to acquire brands which were healthier than their core brands such as SmartWater, and VitaminWater – to fulfil the customer need that their current brands couldn’t.
But, not every business adopts a market orientation - they may adopt other orientation strategies
Product Orientation
Product orientated companies focus on promoting quality, and qualities of the products they sell, rather than the target market need. We can often see this when someone is entering a heavily saturated market, where they have focused on bettering existing competitors offer, rather than creating their own customer need.
Sales Orientation
Sales orientation focuses on persuading the consumer into immediate action, often this approach uses direct response marketing and promotion strategies. However, whilst this may provide the business with short term success, it doesn’t allow for a focus on the customer need other than price sensitivity which will ultimately hinder them.
For a company to fully adopt market orientation, it is not an approach which not only sits within the marketing department (though they may well champion it) it flows through the entire business – it puts the customer need at the heart of every decision.
Do you feel your company is market-orientated? We’re happy to discuss how you can do more to put market orientation at the heart of your organisation. Get in touch here, we’d love to chat.