Marketing
Marketing is the deliberate communication of value, intended to influence consumer decisions. The entire marketing process begins with market research, identifying your target market, and understanding customer need. Marketing operations include all aspects of the business, from developing the product concept to advertising. The goal of marketing is to get people interested in your product or service no matter where they are in the sales cycle.
What are the 5 marketing concepts?
While marketing professionals today don’t really study these five concepts before creating their marketing plan, it is important to understand how these concepts influence and inform business strategy. These concepts, or also referred to as ‘marketing management philosophies’, are helpful in understanding where the company and the potential customer meet.
And since that is the entire role of the marketer, to bring the brand and the customer together, it’s helpful to throw these concepts into the marketing mix.
Production Concept
The production-focused marketing concept first began when Capitalism took its hold on developed countries throughout the world. During this time, beginning with the Industrial Revolution, companies were focused primarily on production and manufacturing.
The competitive advantage was to be able to provide as many products as possible for as little cost as possible. Marketing professionals during that time only had to convince the potential customer that they had the cheapest products available. Since product prices went down when production went up, most companies opted for mass production when possible.
Modern marketing, on the other hand, doesn’t have it so easy.
Fair wages and general humanitarian issues have pushed many companies into a different direction that increases the price per product, forcing them to develop a marketing message that made the inherent value of the product worth the price tag.
Even so, dropshipping companies and major conglomerates alike still have a Production Concept mindset that works well for them (um hello, Amazon).
Product Concept
When companies use the Product Concept to develop their marketing strategy, they focus on quality over quantity. Rather than sacrificing quality for a low cost, businesses focus on improving the quality of their products to better meet customer needs.
Understanding your target audience will help you to identify what the customer value is in a particular product so that you can clearly articulate that in your marketing message.
You can most clearly see this in well-written product descriptions that highlight the product benefits and features. This is especially relevant in the tech industry, where new features develop faster than your production line can keep up with.
Selling Concept
Listen, no good marketing manager will focus solely on sales but some quick-and-dirty online shops still abide by the Selling Concept even in modern marketing.
Why? Because that leads to more money, honey.
Businesses that focus primarily on sales will do whatever it takes to turn a profit. Most of the marketing effort, then, goes into paid ads, cheap discounts, and low-cost production.
Very little attention is paid to the consumer and, as a result, often leads to poor satisfaction. Considering that customer reviews weigh heavily on the decision-making process for consumers, though, the Selling Concept is a somewhat unsustainable way to run a marketing campaign.
Marketing Concept
Traditional marketing and modern marketing alike follow the Marketing Concept when developing an effective marketing plan. With this concept, the potential customer is the primary focus and everything, from product development to customer service, is focused on the consumer.
Some marketing programs focus on the consumer more than others. Relationship marketing, for example, aims to develop a lifelong relationship with the brand’s customer base so that it has customers for, well, the rest of its life. Content marketing, on the other hand, seeks to understand the potential customer simply to be able to produce content that they’ll like.
Societal Marketing Concept
With about 8 billion people on this planet, it makes sense that marketing activity would begin to focus on the wellbeing of people over profit.
Or, at least, alongside profit.
For brands focusing on the Societal Marketing Concept, they will direct all marketing activity toward understanding improving the lives of not only their target market but also of society as a whole. You’ll most often see this when brands incorporate charity into their marketing campaign, much like TOMS Shoes paved the way for charity-based businesses in the 20th century.
