There are a total of five marketing management orientations: production, the product, selling, marketing, and societal marketing. The first three orientations may be grouped together as they are similar in that they all focus on the product. The production orientation values available and affordable products, necessitating improvement of production and distribution mechanisms (Kotler & Armstrong, 2017). The product orientation prefers high-quality and innovative products, making improvements to the product itself important and continuous (Kotler & Armstrong, 2017). The selling orientation is dedicated to cases where customers will not buy their rare and unsought products and need to be motivated via selling or a promotion event (Kotler & Armstrong, 2017). Thus, all of these orientations focus on the quality of the product, with the only difference being on which quality precisely.
The marketing orientation forgoes that principle, being aimed at learning the needs of the trade market and customers and delivering based on them. To this end, it presumes a continuous search for information on the clients to identify their demands and offer solutions to their needs (de Guimarães et al., 2018). The marketing orientation, therefore, has a customer-centered sense-and-respond philosophy, trying to find the right product for the consumers rather than the opposite (Kotler & Armstrong, 2017). However, it has a different distinction from the fifth orientation, societal marketing. That orientation takes into account not only the customer’s needs but society’s present and future needs as well (Kotler & Armstrong, 2017). The marketing orientation does not go that far, focusing purely on the clients and their present needs. Thus, unlike the first three principles, it is consumer-based rather than product-based, and, unlike the societal marketing orientation, it remains local in its aims, both time and scale.
References
de Guimarães, J. C. F., Severo, E. A., & de Vasconcelos, C. R. M. (2018). The influence of entrepreneurial, market, and knowledge management orientations on cleaner production and the sustainable competitive advantage.Journal of Cleaner Production, 174, 1653–1663.
Kotler, P., & Armstrong, G. (2017). Principles of Marketing. Pearson Higher Education.