What is profit oriented in marketing?

In a customer-oriented company, every function and employee is focused on meeting customers’ expressed and latent needs. Such a company recognizes that it can succeed only when its customers are satisfied with its products and behaviour in the market. It evaluates every decision for its effects on its customers.

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In a profit oriented company, the convenience of the functions and the employees comes first. If such a company realizes that it cannot easily produce what customers want, or that it cannot easily serve them the way they want to be served, they choose to ignore such customers.

A customer-oriented company expects and wants its customers to compare its offerings against those of competition, and uses customer feedback to improve its operations. It delves deep into customers’ circumstances to unearth their choice criteria, and ensures that its offerings meet the customers’ choice criteria better than the offerings of its competitors. It orchestrates its marketing mix to meet customers’ choice criteria.

It enables its customers to evaluate its offerings on their choice criteria, and compare them against the offerings of competitors. A profit oriented company refuses to believe that different customers can have different needs, and that customers use their choice criteria to evaluate the company’s offerings.

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It believes that all customers buy on the basis of price and performance, and that there is no need to understand the nuances of their buying behaviour. It does not want to know customers’ concerns lest it has to address them. A customer-oriented company segments its market on the basis of differences among customers, and uses such differences to create different offerings for different segments.

A profit-oriented company designs and produces products depending on what it is good at, and assigns its products to segments that it creates by itself. The company is in trouble when customers’ requirements change, because it continues to produce what it can, and has no system in place to gauge customers’ requirements and correct course.

A customer-oriented company carries out marketing research to understand customers’ needs and behaviour. It treats expenditure on marketing research as an investment that yields valuable payoffs through better understanding of customers’ choice criteria.

It bases its strategy on the knowledge of customers which is gleaned through market research. Market research drives the strategies and operations of the company. In contrast, a profit-oriented company does not believe that marketing research can be a core activity, and trusts its own instincts and judgments about customers and their needs. It does not believe that customers’ needs are so nuanced as to warrant a research to study them. It relies on anecdotes to glean what its customers want to buy.

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A customer-oriented company is always ready to change its strategy, structure and policy so that it meets the customers’ changing requirements. It understands that its strategy, structure and policy are not sacrosanct, and that they are only means to serve customers well. It does not hesitate to do away with even its most cherished practice if its continuance hampers customer satisfaction.

Similarly, it adopts practices which put the company at an inconvenience if they facilitate customers being served well. It does whatever it takes to maintain a fit between its customers’ requirements and its strategy. A profit-oriented company does not want to change, and celebrates status quo. It believes that the company has an existence beyond and above its customers, and that it will find another set of customers if its current customers stop patronizing it, as it is out of tune with customers’ aspirations.

A customer-oriented company understands that its competitors are also trying to serve customers well and that its customers may start finding competitors’ offering attractive if it falters. It gathers intelligence on competitors to understand their objectives and strategies. It tries to understand and anticipate competitive actions to its strategy.

It always factors in competitors’ likely reactions in its strategy. It aggressively counters moves of competitors and does not let them establish beachheads. A profit-oriented company ignores competitors and their moves because it is not ready to inconvenience itself to counter them. It believes that it is so strongly entrenched that competitors are in no position to take away its customers.

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A customer-oriented company treats marketing spend as an investment that has long term benefits and it believes that no investment is too high if it helps to understand customers better. It invests in building brands that reflect the aspirations of its customers, and its brand building exercises touch its customers’ lives in many ways. It does not rely solely on advertising to create brands. A profit-oriented company spends on marketing largely to be on par with competitors, and does not believe that the expenditure will yield much long term benefits.

It believes that customers buy its products because its products are decidedly superior to those of its competitors and that reaching out to them and connecting with them is not what business is all about. It believes that it instinctively understands customer requirements well enough to design and produce products for them, and that researching their needs and taking their feedback only distracts them from doing what they know is best for customers.

A profit-oriented company never realizes that what it believes its customers want is not what they want. It realizes its folly of not trying to understand customers only when customers stop buying its products. By that time, it is usually too late.

In a customer-oriented company, employees who go out of their way to be useful to customers are rewarded and celebrated. Their stories of putting themselves at inconvenience and risk to serve customers become part of the company folklore. The company empowers its employees to serve customers in any way that they can—no one needs to take permission to serve customers better.

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The company understands the process of innovation and protects its creative people. It understands that while a creative person may be doing his best, he may not come up with a useful idea for years, and hence cannot be labelled as incompetent. It celebrates failures which yield learning, and creates an emotionally and economically safe environment for failure.

It expects its employees to fail early and often so that chinks in their assumptions and thought process are revealed before it has sunk too much money in a project. A profit-oriented company expects its employees to go through choreographed chores to serve its customers, and does not expect them to indulge in heroics to do so. If an employee has followed the routine and the norms, and yet the customer is not satisfied, there is nothing that the company can do.

Employees quote company’s policies to convince aggrieved customers why they cannot do something to serve them, which otherwise makes common-sense. The company does not expect its employees to experiment and hence is harsh to them when they make mistakes. It shuts itself from the market, and is really not enamoured by the employee who brings bad news about customers and competitors. Its employees avoid taking risk, and revel in status quo.

A customer-oriented company is always looking for new markets. It has processes to understand customer needs, and therefore, can quickly gauge customers’ new needs, and can design and produce products to meet those needs. Its ability to sense nuanced needs of customers enables it to spot latent needs and new segments, which it can then serve profitably. It ensures that its people, systems and processes are flexible, because it understands that these are only means to serve its customers.

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Therefore, the company is able to adapt when it enters new markets. A profit-oriented company is not interested in new markets, because it is happy doing what it does. And often, such a company is incapable of doing anything other than what it does, because it has always believed that it will never have to do anything else, as the world will remain the same.

Its people, processes and policies are completely inflexible, and hence, it cannot serve any customer need other than what it is doing now. And its singular inability to sense customers’ nuanced needs ensures that it does not have to extend itself. It continues to serve its existing market with its current products till its customers no longer want them.

A customer-oriented company is always alert to the possibility of a competitor understanding customer needs better and then serving those needs. It ensures that it is fast and flexible enough to be able to thwart competitors’ designs to prey on its customers. It is willing to do whatever it takes to retain its competitive advantage, even if it means complete overhaul of its business.

The company will completely reinvent itself to serve its customers better as it is never too much in love with itself. A profit-oriented company strives to remain what it is, even when it can see a competitor preying on its customers. It keeps on producing what has sold in the past unmindful of how its customers and competitors are evolving.

Impact of Marketer’s Commitments:

Commitments by marketers impact the company and the customers both for the company it indicates the promise of delivery of its offering, while for the customer, it shapes expectations. Commitments must consider the short term and long term impacts on both the concerned stakeholders.

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Despite differences in their personal attributes, behaviour and styles, successful marketers excel in making, honouring and remaking commitments to customers. Marketing commitments can take many forms which include installing special machines, serving customer requirements, delivering an item at a particular time, positioning the product and public statements.

These commitments exert both an immediate and enduring influence on the company. A commitment to deliver an item sooner than it is normally done exerts pressure on the production system of the company. When a company positions its offering, it implicitly chooses one market over another.

When a company selects a target market, it is willing to forego important segments that may emerge in the future. In a market where buying criteria are still being established, it may be fatal to position the company’s offering very narrowly. Selecting a celebrity to spearhead the marketing campaign of the company has consequences both in the short term and the long term.

The idea is that commitments made by marketers bind the company in some particular way for some time in future. Marketers should be able to think through these consequences. But when marketers find out that their commitments are holding the company back, they should replace the old commitments with fresh ones.

Customers understand that commitments implicitly have some conditions attached to them and when conditions change dramatically, an old commitment should be replaced by a more inventive one. Commitments should not bind the company in a manner that compromises its very survival. It is not as if the company is going back on its commitment, it is just that an antiquated commitment is being replaced by fresh one, which reflects current realities.

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