Marketing Concept

A Comprehensive Guide to Marketing Concepts

Contemporary marketing concepts involve creating, communicating, and delivering products/services for customers using innovative approaches.

To build a long-term, profitable relationship with your customers, you need to understand the importance of marketing concepts. 

Marketing professionals use different strategies to achieve their goals. 

There are five major marketing concepts that are successfully used by professionals to gain the confidence of their consumers and create a long-time relationship that drives sustained revenue. Before going into an explanation, you need to first understand how and why marketing agencies strive for your success. 

Top-rated marketing agencies keep their customers happy by incorporating strategies to help them generate more revenue, maximize profits, and stay competitive. 

The hard work they put into making innovative marketing strategies benefit the company’s bottom line as well as its customers. All these strategies stem from a few core marketing concepts.

Types of Marketing Concepts

Five main marketing concepts have evolved over the decades. Not every concept may apply to your business, so let me explain each one of those in detail. 

The Production Concept

The production concept prioritizes operations and is based on the notion that customers will choose products that are available at a cost that is similar to or lesser than other competing products.

In the 1950s, early capitalism drove companies to be as efficient as possible. This was a time when companies were focused on maximum efficiency in manufacturing to ensure they received the most profits, which was used to further scale their business. 

This marketing concept was useful for companies in a growing industry, but it came with risk as well. When brands become more focused on production and cost, they lose touch with the customer and experience decreased sales despite their competitively priced and widely accessible merchandise.

The Product Concept

The opposite of the production concept is the product concept. This marketing concept assumes that consumers care about other factors than just cost when making a purchase and are willing to pay more for quality, innovation, and durability. This strategy focuses on continuous product enhancement and innovation.

For example, Tesla has mastered the concept of useful technology. The company’s target audience loves the new releases no matter how much they cost. Even if there are cheaper, off-brand products that perform the same functions, there will be people who will still gladly spend their money just to own a Tesla product.

Additionally, marketers who only market keeping these three principles in mind could miss out on attracting customers. There are also shoppers who are motivated by the availability and price of a product.

The Selling Concept

Marketing using the selling concept is an expensive marketing strategy that fails to consider the customer’s needs or product quality. It mainly focuses on getting the consumer to complete a transaction without much attention to customer satisfaction, which, unfortunately, is a non-scalable strategy. 

In this new era, the marketing concept is more centered on the belief that aggressive marketing using benefits can convince customers to buy products they don’t need.

Pepsi is a good example of a company that uses this strategy. Everyone knows that Pepsi is sweet, bubbly, and refreshing. However, many people also think that it’s sugary, has no nutritional value, and is terrible for your health. So how does Pepsi counter this? They create ads that promote a deeper message like unity, peace and understanding to cover up the negative aspects.

The Marketing Concept

As marketing becomes more complicated, companies must rise above the rest to succeed. A key component of this is focusing on the customer and delivering superior value. Many refer to this concept as a “customer-first approach”.

Revlon is a perfect example of this marketing concept. The brand knows that many women are tired of makeup products that don’t look natural on their skin. Revlon also realized that many women are sick of being told what products to buy.

So Revlon introduced simple and effective products for skincare and makeup. These products are not only nourishing for the skin but also easy to use. Glossier encourages customers to express their personal style.

The Societal Concept

Societal Marketing is one of the new marketing concepts emerging in the business world wherein marketers believe their companies have a moral responsibility to help society. This is because they believe people, profits, and society should work together. 

It’s based on the idea that marketers must promote what is good for people before profits, regardless of a company’s sales goals.

Most employees of a company live in the societies they market to. As such, they should advertise products responsibly with the best interests of their local community in mind.

The fast-food industry is a perfect illustration of what societal marketing concepts strive to fix. In today’s society, people want fast food but it’s bad for the environment and our health. Although society wants fast food, the industry should provide healthier options to address this demand from consumers.

How to Choose Best Marketing Concepts

All of the marketing concepts above are effective, but which is most effective for you? Before designing your marketing plan, you need to ask yourself some important questions. These questions will help you design and strategize a successful marketing plan.

• Who are your target demographics? If you’re selling a product, who is going to buy it? If you’re selling specific services, which demographics are looking for the services you provide? How can you use this information to bring these people in as customers?
• Besides profit or an enriched bank balance, what are your goals as a business? For example, do you want to build an army of devoted followers? Do you want to solve a problem within your niche? 
• Does your brand stand out from the rest? Can your customers tell why they should buy from you?

In the years since its inception, successful marketing concepts have moved away from the profit-driven model to a people-centered model. The modern consumer is more likely to choose businesses that put them at the center of their strategy.

Functions of Marketing

Promotion

Promotion always makes it to the top of the to-do list when marketers set their goals. A marketing professional’s core functionality is to make the brand’s voice heard loud and clear among the target audience.

The ultimate aim is to create brand awareness, recognition and elevate the company profile in a way that helps drive more business and revenue. 

There are times when promotional and marketing strategies converge – PR and advertisements, for example. 

The most common marketer tools are:

• Content marketing 
• Email marketing 
• Social media marketing 
• Influencer marketing 

The success of inbound marketing activities that help in garnering more leads and sales doesn’t require much emphasis. There is no denying the role played by promotion in helping businesses leverage marketing success. 

Selling

The primary goal of any marketer is to drive the prospect to buy the product or service that the company is selling. Every marketing campaign you run, from brand messaging to social media engagement, aims to grab opportunities and convert them into a profitable business.

However, blatant sales pitches pose a risk of your target audience not feeling connected with the product that you intend to sell. 

Once you gain the attention of a potential customer, whether it’s a B2C or B2B prospect, you need to find ways to nurture the lead and successfully move it on to the sales funnel. When it reaches one of your business consultants, the prospect converts into a customer, and every time a customer makes a purchase of your product or service, the profit margin increases.

Marketing communication plays a vital role in making it all happen. Yes, you have to entice the prospect with product-centric benefits so that the customer already has an idea as to how your product can be a better choice than the competitors in the market.

Product Development

Building a product that can overcome the shortcomings of other similar products does not happen overnight. It takes dedicated groundwork to identify the loopholes, mending them and delivering the product in the most effective way that rightly caters to the dynamic needs of the target audience.

A marketer cannot be overlooked here because good market research is the backbone of a successful product. By doing 3 things, you can contribute to the betterment of the product that your company sells in multiple ways. 

1. Competitor analysis is an integral part of complete market research. When you get a bigger picture of your competitors, the additional features they provide and the strategies they use to boost sales, you will have a better idea of what you’re up against and some ways in which you can gain a competitive advantage. 

2. Creating opportunities to converse with people who belong to your target market can help you understand their needs better. When you step into your customer’s shoes, you can look at things from their perspective and fix the issues in the product or come up with a new product that suits your customer’s requirements.

3. Customer feedback can give you valuable insights if you can take the time to dig into it a little more. Coordinate with the customer support team to analyze the feedback of your customers, figure out their expectations and that should help you to upgrade your marketing strategies to bring in more qualified leads that eventually translates into a sales win.

A marketer is the common point of contact in all these cases, so if you want to meet organizational goals, it is imperative that you go the extra mile to pull up the information required.

Marketing Data Management

Authentic data is an essential component of marketing. It is the information that you collect regarding various verticals of the product, including customer behavior, demographics, competitors, industry trends and much more. This type of data comes in handy to draw a strategic marketing plan that aids in achieving desired results and ensure massive revenue flow. 

Marketing data is timeless because the existing data often forms a robust base to collect new data, gain fresh market insights and trace your business growth through the years. Why keep the data locked up in some random space when it can offer invaluable help with your current work?

This way, the marketing information can also be passed on to the other teams within your network to help them understand the customer concerns better, identify the upcoming trends in the industry, and explore new possibilities that can fetch more revenue.

Pricing

Setting up fair pricing is as important as creating a product that can meet the expectations of your potential customers. A smart pricing plan does not stop after attracting customers. It is something that is capable of achieving a perfect balance between the cost of production and delivery while competing with the pricing structure of the other players in the industry.

Broad market research allows you to gain maximum transparency into how your competitors set their pricing and the parameters they consider before finalizing the same.

Do you know the brand value of the product is yet another key influencer of its pricing? Let’s take Montblanc pens for example. This is one of the costliest pens on the market and is still popular around the globe. There are other brands that offer pens at an affordable cost but that does not stop people from buying Montblanc pens.

This means the brand value of a product makes a big difference and customers don’t mind spending more on goods with a higher brand value. Like in the mentioned example, the brand name speaks for the credibility of the product and sales happen without much of an effort.

Every top brand that you see today would have started at the bottom but behind it lies the dedicated effort of a marketer. Study the market to know the current value of your brand among your target audience. 

Besides helping you evaluate where your brand stands and set up a pricing plan, in-depth market insights also help you to create a powerful marketing funnel that ultimately drives more sales.

Financing

Some people think financing isn’t a part of marketing, and it’s a common misconception. Let’s put it simply, it is one of the less focused areas that is vital for achieving your business goals. Sustainable financing is mandatory for efficient marketing. How will you run marketing campaigns without securing a budget for them? 

When it comes to financing, it is not just about establishing a business. Instead, it is an ongoing concern for every business owner. 

If you can come up with a result-driven marketing strategy that attracts more business opportunities, brings in more qualified leads, proves useful in boosting the revenue flow, and helps in taking the business to new markets, you will be in the limelight.

This also means you earn the confidence of the organization, which, in turn, helps you to secure a big budget for your upcoming marketing campaigns. 

After all, a marketer who makes full use of the available resources and formulates the right strategies can be sure of witnessing a high return on investment and that’s definitely a win-win.

Distribution

Does that sound too far from marketing? No worries. There is an explanation. Whenever you launch a new product or upgrade an existing one, you need to create “hype” around it. 

This is a great chance to catch the attention of your target audience and it’s not an opportunity to miss out on. Yes, you have to spread the word as fast as you can and who can do this better than a marketer? 

Use every digital channel from email to social media to your advantage to create awareness and make sure you reach out to every potential customer out there. If everything goes well, you will create a buzz, leading sales to skyrocket in a short span of time.

Wait. It doesn’t end here. You also have to anticipate the customer demand rate at every juncture and ensure the organization is ready to cater to it. It is because if the company falls short of meeting the market demand, a part of your potential customers will be dissatisfied. There is a higher probability of this dissatisfaction being reflected in your future marketing campaigns. Handle distribution with utmost care to leave a positive impact on your target audience.

In a nutshell, the marketing process is vast and it touches upon everything about an organization. Using the most effective marketing concepts is the secret behind the exponential growth of every business.