Market orientation is a business approach that helps businesses to prioritize and identify the needs and expectations of the customers, design and create products and services to cater to the customer needs and expectations. Business organizations that implement market orientation give special consideration to the needs and expectations of their target market. This is a critical part of the organization’s research and development (R&D) team for new product development.
Marketing orientation is considered a customer-centered approach to product design and development. It involves the data collected through market research aimed to identify what customers in a particular target market consider as their primary needs, main concerns, or personal preferences about using a product from a range of similar types of products.
It is identified that the conventional approach to the development of the product is the opposite. Based on that, the marketing strategies of the organization focus on developing key selling points to create a customer need for the product in the target market by promoting an existing product rather than designing and developing a product with the qualities that the customers say they want.
Many business organizations get the support of additional data analysis methods to identify the customer desires, expectations, and preferences that are not expressed specifically through market surveys or researches. Identifying these expectations will help the product developers to develop and design a product that can meet the customers’ unmet needs. They may even add improvements to the product that the customers are not considering as an option to satisfy by using the product.
A thorough analysis of the market research allows the business organization to focus on developing the product based on the most demanded characteristics. With the increasing trend of technologies and the impact of globalization on the business world, the businesses that can identify the crucial customer needs and the products that have the capability of adapting to the changing market trends can gain a competitive advantage over the competitive products or brands.
Advantages of Market Orientation
– Market orientation provides a big concentration on improving customer service and product support that allows the business to assist customers, solve their concerns and help them with the functionality of the product.
– Market orientation helps to ensure a high rate of customer satisfaction and try to make a long-term customer base by creating brand loyalty. This is done through various effective marketing methods such as advertising and word-of-mouth marketing.
– It will help the organization to identify customer desires that may not cost-effective or practical to implement in the real business world. However, it provides n opportunity for business organizations to develop the product and find practical ways to satisfy the customer desires.
– To achieve success in the business world, the business organizations must ensure that all the departments in the business process must adopt, adhere and follow the marketing orientation approach as it can be considered an important part of the organizational culture. When implemented correctly, market orientation can be helpful for businesses to increase their customer base, create brand loyalty and help to achieve growth and success.
– Ideas that are difficult to achieve may inform long-term business development strategies. Tasks that are not cost-effective and practical may become easy to achieve due to the improvements in the business environment.
When considering as a whole, market orientation not only helps the marketing team of the organization but also the entire business process. Since the ultimate expectation of most businesses is to increase profits by achieving a bigger and better customer base for their products or services. Apart from that market orientation helps the business to build a closer relationship with the customers and achieve a competitive advantage.