What Is Marketing

What is Marketing?

Individualization of demand forces organisations to be market-driven in order to compete in the rapid changing environment (Tseng and Piller 2011). In other words, the organisation needs to be customer centric where the focus must be an outside-in to understand what customers truly value and work backwards into the entire value chain within the organisation. This promotes innovations to generate greater customer values in terms of Price, Performance/Quality, Emotional and Relational values. The ultimate aim is to achieve the organisation goals while meeting and exceeding customers’ needs better than its competitors through one of the four value dimensions.

Pandora and HiDesigns

Pandora and HiDesigns are good exemplars of this marketing concept. Pandora’s mission is to celebrate women by means of personal expression (Pandora 2016). Pandora’s main success factor is due to its highly customizable products. Individualization of demand means consumers prefer products with product-personality (Gover and Schoormans 2005). On the other hand, HiDesigns’s main success factor is due to its ability to produce quality products at competitive prices.

Both companies’ successes have similar environment dependent though some has greater impact than the other.

Macroenvironment:

• Economic forces such as lower currencies and inflations leading to low manufacturing cost.
• Current slowdown/downturn in global economy: both manufacture non necessity products.
• Demographic forces such as country’s female age structure.
• Political and legal forces in which its manufacturing facility situates.

Microenvironment:

• Competition from cheaper substitutes.
• Other brand names such as Tiffany & Co., Swarovski.
• Fluctuation of prices in raw materials.
• Distribution networks.        

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Key/Surprising Learning Point:

Organisations need to be market-driven to provide customer values and still profitable.

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References

Tseng, Mitchell, and Frank Piller. 2011. The Customer Centric Enterprise: Advances in Mass Customization and Personalization: Springer Science & Business Media.

Govers, P.C.M., and J.P.L. Schoormans. 2005. "Product Personality and Its Influence on Consumer Preference." Journal of Consumer Marketing 22 (4): 189-197. doi: doi:10.1108/07363760510605308.