3 Marketing approaches
Marketing is based on thinking about the business in terms of customer needs and their satisfaction. Marketing differs from selling because:
‘Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing invariable does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs.’ (Levitt, 1960)
In other words, marketing has less to do with getting customers to pay for your product as it does developing a demand for that product and fulfilling the customer's needs.
In order to understand the nature of marketing it is helpful to consider marketing in a number of different contexts. The basic principles of the marketing concept, i.e. the importance of making customers central to the business’s marketing efforts, apply to virtually all marketing contexts. However, at a slightly more detailed level, there are differences between marketing to consumers and marketing to other organisations.
Consumer marketing
A ‘consumer market’ refers to individuals and families who buy products and services for their own consumption. This is distinct from business markets, which consist of businesses (and other organisations) who buy goods and services in order to incorporate them into their own production or other organisational processes. Consumer markets therefore exclude all types of buying by organisations. Consumer marketing is perhaps the kind of marketing that most people think of first, when they think of marketing.
Business-to-business marketing
This is where businesses sell to other organisations (not just other businesses, even though that is what it is called). Purchases by organisations account for over half of all economic activity in industrialised countries (Ellis, 2011), even if business-to-consumer marketing is more visible to the general public. Typically, several organisations are involved in producing every product or service sold to a consumer or end-user. An example of this would be farmers selling milk to a dairy, the dairy processes the milk and then sells it to the supermarket. We are starting to see innovations where the middle man is being cut out.
Social marketing
Social marketing is the idea that the tools of marketing can be applied to health and social behaviours. Marketing techniques have been used to shift various behaviours such as exercise, smoking, drinking and drug use (Hastings and Domegan, 2014).
Fundraising
Voluntary sector organisations that depend on donations to carry out their work increasingly use marketing techniques for their fundraising activities. They may conduct market research to find out what motivates those who support particular causes and how best to reach them. And they increasingly provide techniques similar to ‘after sales services’ to let donors know how their funds are being used and what is being achieved with the money.
Activity 3
Consider the five case studies [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] and think about which of the forms of marketing you could expect them to undertake based on these descriptions. (To open the case study in a new tab on a PC, hold down the Ctrl key when clicking.)
Show your thoughts by writing the names of the businesses in the boxes below. You should limit the businesses to a maximum of two types of marketing.
| Type of marketing | Business |
|---|---|
| Consumer marketing | |
| Business-to-business marketing | |
| Social marketing | |
| Fundraising |
Comment
| Type of marketing | Business |
|---|---|
| Consumer marketing | Bike-a-lot, Mucky Pets, Red Bush Brewery |
| Business-to-business marketing | JJ Components, Red Bush Brewery, Turn-it-round |
| Social marketing | Bike-a-lot |
| Fundraising | Turn-it-round |
You may have chosen different boxes and that is fine. There is no correct answer here. We have made a couple of reasonable assumptions. The key points from our boxes are:
- At least two of the businesses are not likely to focus on the consumers in their marketing. JJ Components and Turn-it-round are not likely to gain business by targeting the consumers directly. They would focus on the customers, who are likely to be other businesses.
- We have suggested Bike-a-lot might under take social marketing with respect to safe riding practices as part of a national campaign.
- We have made an assumption that Turn-it-round gets some money through fundraising activities.
2.4 Variety-seeking buying behaviour