The Conceptual Framework of Marketing

July 20, 2024 Globalinfo247

A marketing framework is a visual representation or logical flow of your marketing plan. It contains several components that work together as a whole to bring your marketing vision to reality.

By taking the time to write a marketing framework, your options for marketing your business, products, and services can become clearer and you can create an actionable plan for promoting your products or services.

The pragmatic marketing framework provides a standard language for your entire product/service team and a blueprint of the key activities needed to bring profitable, problem-oriented products to market.

The Marketing Exchange is the act of obtaining a desired object from someone by offering of value in return.

Several marketing concepts with management orientations have been articulated by marketing experts under whom organizations can conduct their marketing activity.

These include the production concept, the product concept, the selling concept, and the marketing and societal marketing concept.

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1) The Production Concept

It is one of the oldest concepts guiding sellers. It’s a management orientation that assumes that consumers will favour those productions which are available and affordable and that the major task of management is the pursuit of improved production and distribution efficiency. The implicit presume of this concept to the organizations are:

1) Consumers are primarily interested in product availability and low price.

2) Consumers‟ know the price of the competing brands, and the organization‟s task is to keep improving production and distribution efficiency and lowering costs as the key to attracting and retaining customers.

Organizations should therefore focus their main energy on achieving work efficiency without introducing impersonality and consumer insensitivity.

2) The Product Concept

Assumes offer that most customers will favour those products that offer the most quality for the price, and therefore the organization should devote its energy to enhancing product/service quality.

The concept indicates that consumers are primarily interested in product quality, and know the quality and feature differences among the competing products. Products are chosen based on obtaining the most quality for their money.

The organization should not operate solely on a product concept because consumers do not automatically learn about new or improved products, believing that they are superior or showing a willingness to pay a higher price.

An organization with a better product will not progress unless it takes positive steps to design, package, and price the new product attractively, place it into convenient distribution channels and bring it to the attraction of the customers concerned.

The organization should have first determined whether the new product was needed to solve this problem effectively.

3) The Selling Concept

Assumes that customers will either not buy or not buy enough of the organizational products unless the organization maintains substantial efforts to stimulate their interest in its products are:

Consumers can be induced to buy more through various sales-stimulating devices.
Consumers tend to resist buying most things that are not essential.

Management’s task here is to have a strong sale-oriented department as a key to attracting and holding customers.

Organizations practicing this concept often assume that their products are “sold” not “bought”.

Potential customers are sought out and hardly sold the benefits of the product.

Great risks abound in practicing the selling concepts, especially in its hard-driving form, where customer satisfaction is considered secondary to obtaining a sale. This eventuality spoils the market of the seller, in the long run, there is no repeat business by a customer.

4) The Marketing Concept

This is a business philosophy that challenges the above three business orientations. Its central tenets crystallized in the 1950s. It holds (the goals of the selling company) and consists of the company being effective than competitors in creating, delivering, and communicating customer value to its selected target customers.

The marketing concept rests on four pillars: target market, customer needs integrated marketing and profitability.

Distinctions between the sales concept and the marketing concept:

The sales concept focuses on the needs of the seller. The concept focuses on the needs of the buyer.

The sales concept is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his/her product into cash. The marketing concept is preoccupied with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by using the product as a solution to the customer’s problem (needs).

The marketing concepts represent the major change in today’s company orientation that provides the foundation to achieve competitive advantage. This philosophy is the foundation of consultative selling.

The marketing concept has evolved into a fifth and more refined company orientation. This concept is more theoretical and will undoubtedly influence future forms of marketing and selling approaches.

5) The Societal Marketing Concept

While marketing concept lays emphasis on consumer satisfaction, this concept argues for an extension of the focus of marketing. A call on organizations to focus more on consumer well- being which his satisfaction may not accommodate.

Organizations are exhorted by this concept to look beyond extant consumer satisfaction to their long-run well-being and the well-being of the larger society. Organizations should not strive to satisfy theirs at the expense of society.

In furtherance of the aspiration, organizations are to reconcile consumer satisfaction and their objective with social and environmental considerations.

The Market

Kotler (1994) defined a market as consisting of all potential customers sharing a particular need or want who might be willing and able to engage in exchange to satisfy that need or want. Achumba (1996) defined a market as consisting of people with purchasing power who are willing to spend money on their needs and wants.

Certainly, there must be a group of people with buying power and who have needs and wants to be satisfying for a market to exist.

The business of selling and buying commodities (products and services). It is not confined to space, locality, and time. The internet enables the market to be in cyberspace, 24 hours a day (interactively online marketing).

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