Question

The competing concepts under which organisations have conducted marketing activities include: the production concept, product concept, selling concept, marketing concept and the societal marketing concept.

a) Which concept is the most effective?

b) Describe two trends in technological environment and their implications for marketing strategy.

Answer 1

(a)Social marketing concept holds “marketing strategy should deliver value to customers in a way that maintains or improves both the consumer’s and society’s well-being”.

It calls for sustainable marketing, socially and environmentally responsible marketing that meets the present needs of consumers and businesses while also preserving or enhancing the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

The Societal Marketing Concept puts the Human welfare on top before profits and satisfying the wants.

(b) Unbundling production from delivery:

Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever-smaller increments cost effectively. Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems.

Extracting more value from interactions:

Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or simple rule-based (transactional) activities. As a result, a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—tacit interactions, as we call them. By 2015 we expect employment in jobs primarily involving such interactions to account for about 44 percent of total US employment, up from 40 percent today. Europe and Japan will experience similar changes in the composition of their workforces.