At marketplace, there are several orientations which organizations could adopt ranging from Production orientation, sales orientation to marketing orientation (Kotler, Burton, Dean, Brown and Armstrong, 2013). Marketing Orientation is widely advocated by organizations as the starting point is seeking to understand customers’ needs and wants, an “outside-in” perspective in contrast to the “inside-in” perspective for the first three orientations.
In today’s ever changing marketplace where customers’ needs and wants and expectations are subjected to changes on a continuous basis. In order for organizations to stay competitive, delivering superior quality products and services, ongoing tracking of changing customers’ needs are needed. A market-oriented approach needs to be adopted.
Jaworski and Kohli (1990) defined market orientation as being “the organization-wide generation of market intelligence pertaining to current and future customer needs, dissemination of the intelligence across departments and organization-wide responsiveness to it”. Slater & Narver (1994) went further by highlighting the need for organisations to completely understand the market. It means, therefore, that customers’ information must go beyond research and promotional functions to permeate every organisational function.
Being market orientation would imply that organisations need to be customer focus, competitor focus and inter-functional coordination of its activities. More detail discussions of these are as follows:
– Customer focus is to create superior value for buyers continuously that requiring a seller to understand a buyer’s needs and wants, finding ways to deliver customer value (enhance benefits and reduce cost) and measuring customer satisfaction which is clearly evident from repeat sales from customers other than market survey.
– Competitors focus requires organisations to understand key competitors’ strength, weakness and even their long term goals. Tackling competitors’ strength may require organisations to strengthen their competitive advantage such as seeking alliance from partners.
– Inter-functional coordination requires sharing of information and organisational-wide co-ordination of resources such as timely responds to competitors’ actions to enhance organisations competitive advantage.
Raymond Loh Chee Yen Principal Lecturer School of Business and Law TMC Academy
Reference Lists:
1) Kotler, P., Burton, S., Deans, K., Brown, L. and Armstrong, G., (2013) Marketing, 9th edition. Pearson Education Australia, Australia.
2) Slater, S and Narver, J,(1994) “Market orientation, Customer Value and Performance”, Business Horizon, March-April issue.
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