Unit 1: Marketing - Concept and process of marketing - Marketing concept
Business Orientations
An organisation like British Airways (BA), which takes into account the needs of its markets before it plans its processes, is said to be market led or market oriented. It has changed the focus of its marketing from a marketing plan devised in the marketing department to an organisation-wide involvement in creating an offering of superior value for the customer. Studies have shown that being market led is linked to profitability in profit-based organisations and to survival in non-profit organisations (Slater, 1990).
The market-led approach has three components:
- consumer orientation
- competitor orientation
- inter-functional co-ordination
Figure 2: The market-led organisation (Source: Jaworsky and Kohli, 1990)
The first two involve the organisation-wide generation of market intelligence regarding current and future customer needs, and making this information available to all departments. Customer orientation also involves continuously monitoring customer information in order to be able to create superior value.
Inter-functional co-ordination concerns the organisation-wide co-ordination of resources in response to customers. Inter-departmental ‘connectedness’ has a key role to play in the dissemination of and the responsiveness to market intelligence by the organisation (Jaworski and Kohli, 1990).
Do all organisations need to be market oriented?
