Introduction
The marketing concept is a fundamental initiative of marketing upon which organizations survive by fulfilling the needs and wants of customers. It has tremendously evolved and it reflects the approaches of doing the business. The key objective of most organizations is to get profits to achieve the profits, such organizations need to consider the concept of marketing to effectively satisfy their respective customers. The changing needs, as well as wants of customers, greatly influence the strategic plans of the organizations, this makes the satisfaction of customers’ needs the major key as far as marketing is concerned. Therefore, marketing is considered as the management process that is responsible for the identification, anticipation, and satisfaction of customers’ requirements in a profitable manner (Enis, 1973).
Application of the concept of Marketing
The marketing concept is applied from the top management to the low management levels as well as across the entire organizational departments; this renders it to be the key philosophy of carrying out business. The management has to ensure that the requirements of the clients occupy the foremost part of their minds.
According to Kotler and Levy (1969), the traditional business of marketing creates a more useful set of guiding concepts for the entire organization. Kotler and Levy examined that the choice faced with managers within the non-business organizations is not necessarily on whether to apply the marketing concept or not, but concerns whether if it has to be effectively or poorly applied. They asserted that the relevance of the commercial concepts together with the tools to the non-profit making world is believed not to be frictionless. Due to the broadening movement, the marketing concept is considered to be important to the new types of organizations and the newly introduced various types of transactions (Luck, 1969). The new organizations involve public as well as non-profit kinds of organizations that are previously differentiated from the commercial organizations; this is concerning how such organizations are funded as well as to their responsible entities. However, the new transactional types have the core non-economic components that involve no exchanges for consumers to undertake the economic offerings payments for the organization (Kotler & Levy, 1969).
Kotler viewed marketing in three main consciousness stages. The first consciousness stage concerns the pre-1969 expression of marketing as essentially the business subject involving market transactions. The second consciousness stage was the 1969 understanding of marketing, this was considered to be relevant to the entire organizations with customers as well as involving the organization-client transactions. The last which is the third consciousness stage is generic-related and is the current conventional understanding of marketing and very appropriate for the entire organizational relationships not only with their respective customers but with their surrounding publics.
The main distinctive concept within the third consciousness is transactions, rendering the application of the marketing concept to any given social unit that aims at exchanging values with some other related social units (Kotler, 1972). Kotler argued that marketing needs to be expanded to involve some transactions between a given organization of any kind and its entire public.
The aesthetics and ideologies limitations of the marketing concept
Despite the perceptible drive and the existing validity of understanding strategic social organizations within the context of marketing, Hirschman presents an antithetical kind of argument introducing two categories of producers as well as their respective products. Hirschman does not base her argument on the philosophical norms which concern the appropriate or rather right domain in marketing which has dominated the majority of previous criticisms, but she relied on the behavioral basis (Hirschman, 1983). The normative framework view of the marketing concept was not considered to be relevant for the two categories of producers due to the personal values as well as the social norms that define the process of production. The two producers are;
Artists
The Artists are the kind of producers who involve in production expressing their subjective conceptions regarding beauty, emotion, or rather the aesthetic ideal. The Artists are motivated by self-fulfillment needs through their creativity, this renders the creative process to be intrinsically satisfying. According to Hirschman (1983), Artists greatly differ from the producers of utilitarian products since the value of their creativity is reflected in expressive qualities and not technical competence.
Ideologists
Ideologists are producers are those producers who present the integrated sets of both positive and normative statements about the world and how it should be. They formulate beliefs concerning the reality of nature and its desirable states (Hirschman, 1983). Similar to Artists, the creators such as; Karl Max, Adolf Hitler, Bertrand Russell, and Henry Bergson, greatly formulate ideology with the view of self-expression need. Ideologists consider their works being intensively personal, with great satisfaction motive and self-revealed knowledge.
The main distinctive characteristic within aesthetic and the ideology industries involves the majority of the creators that exhibit self or rather the peer orientation; this is in contrast to the commercialized industries with the entire public values. Self-Oriented creativity which is product cantered kind of marketing concerns categorical creators who involve their evaluative criteria not only in the entire public but also in peers identifying themselves with self-oriented creativity as well as the product-centered activities of marketing (Hirschman, 1983).
The implication of the concept
The concept of marketing implies that for an organization to achieve its goals as well as increasingly become more profitable, it has to focus its strategic efforts on the development of marketing mixes that effectively meet the consumer’s needs. Due to the varying nature of consumer needs, consideration of more than one marketing mix has to be taken for adequate satisfaction of customer needs in the whole market (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). Target marketing is among the major important ideas of contemporary marketing and it considers the following three main steps;
- Market segmentation
- Market targeting
- Market positioning
As the discussion concerning the marketing scope continues, various concepts on the complementary business are being developed. Such theories include; corporate social responsibility, stakeholder management, collaborative communication, corporate communications, and the integrated marketing kind of communication are successfully replacing some sections from the original marketing scope. The identified concepts originate from the existing boundaries for a given empowered social setting as well as complexity in the growing business, covering the widening gap is most likely to experience more power transfers to several consumer environments. This exacerbates the latent kind of conflicts between the producers as well as consumers, this makes the mediation of the conflicts be the role of marketing (Bagozzi, 1975).
To a larger extent, the marketing concept suggests that customers need to be handled like royals who are provided with good quality products, although, such customers are faced with the problem of violent attacks in controlling the brands, stores, and the brutal corporate behavior. Whereas the marketing departments focus on the need to concentrate on the perception of the customers, the marketplaces, societies, and cultures are concerned with ways for consumer resistance. The available marketing theory approaches greatly ignore the negative social noise (Manoff, 1985).
Conclusion
The marketing concept has got a very significant inference to management. This is simply because it has to be adopted by the organization as a whole and not restricted to the marketing department only. The marketing concept is considered to be relevant to the new types of organizations and the newly introduced various types of transactions.
References
Bagozzi, R.P (1975). Marketing as exchange. Journal of Marketing. Vol. 39, 32-39.
Enis, B. M., (1973). Deepening the concept of marketing. Journal of Marketing. Vol. 37, 57-62.
Hirschman, E. C. (1983). Aesthetics, ideologies, and the limits of the marketing concept. Journal of Marketing. Vol. 47, 45 -55.
Kotler, P., & Levy, S. (1969). Broadening the concept of marketing. Journal of Marketing. Vol.33, 10-15.
Luck, D., (1969). Broadening the concept of marketing – too far. Journal of Marketing. Vol. 33, 53-55.
Manoff, R.K. (1985). Social Marketing. New York: Praeger Publishers.
Vargo, S. L., & Lusch, R. F. (2004). Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. Journal of Marketing. Vol.68, 1-17.