Marketing Concept

Introduction

        Marketing is a strategy for allocating time and money (resources) to obtain profit for supplying product and service. In other words, marketing is the process which firm use to identify, anticipate and satisfy customer needs in order to manage profitability from strong customer relationships (Kotler and Armstrong, 2012). Customer’s satisfaction can be responded by product offering; for example goods, services, experiences, events, persons, places, properties, organizations, ideas and information by which these products are the part of marketing mix or 4ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion). There are three explanation about customer’s requirement in term of marketing; needs are the four basic human needs such as clothing, food, dwelling and medical care, wants are the needs that are shaped by state of society and culture and if wants are supported by purchasing power, they will become demands. For this reason, Peter Drucker stated that “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”, and another words that were also stated by Drucker is “The aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.” This essays will discuss about the second statement as why selling concept is not traditional marketing anymore and how marketing concept makes selling superfluous. The 4 core concepts of marketing, which have been adopted since 1850s, are production concept (1850s-1900s), product concept (1900s-1930s), selling concept (1930s-1950s), marketing concept (1950s-present) and societal marketing concept (1970s-present) (Keelson, 2012) (Appendix1).

Selling concept

        As mentioned above, this essay will only focus on selling and marketing concept. According to Kotler and Armstrong, selling concept takes and inside-out perspective because buying of customer relates to ability of company to offer a good product with the best promotion especially the products that customers do not think of buying normally, hence, selling is the way to find the right customer for company’s existing product and then makes a profit by heavy selling and promotion through marketing techniques such as personal selling and advertising (Appendix 2). Even though selling concept is not widely used in today’s business environment as was stated in the part by Comyns and Jones (1927) “Obvious pressure to buy may lose the customer for the future even though it takes the immediate sales”, some business type still need this concept for their success and accomplishment; for instance insurance, online shopping, door to door selling, car sales or even blood donation. Ford motor company is a good example of selling concept because it is a company that initially ignored customer needs by selling the Model T for many years even it became old-fashion at that time owing to the changes in the automobile market. Henry Ford believed that his product was still what the customer needs and continued to sell it in the market while every brand already improved and changed. After that, Model T’s revenue and market share drop down, therefore, this leads Henry Ford finally accepted consumer needs and then introduced a new model for preparing his business into marketing concept era.