What is 'The Marketing Concept' and how has it developed over time? The marketing concept is a philosophy. The philosophy is that company's need to find out the needs and wants of their customers

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What is 'The Marketing Concept' and how has it developed over time?

The marketing concept is a philosophy. The philosophy is that company’s need to find out the needs and wants of their customers before they make any decisions on what they are going to produce. Also to make sure that the satisfaction of a customer is met at all times. What they produce needs to satisfy the customers needs and wants better than their competitions. One of the ways to do this is to carry out research and ask the actual customer exactly what their wants and needs are. Nowadays most companies have adopted the marketing concept, but this hasn't always been the way. Marketing has developed and changed so much over the years, back in 1776, Adam Smith wrote that the needs of producers should be considered only with the regard to meeting the needs of consumers*. This philosophy is consistent with the marketing concept but it was not adopted widely until about 200 years later.

The philosophy in the early 1920's, the time of the Industrial Revolution, was called the 'production concept'. This worked by companies only producing products that they could produce most efficiently. Companies then thought that by producing products, and lots of them, that were cheap that the product would then sell itself and therefore create a further demand for it all by itself. The production concept only had two questions that companies would ask themselves before producing a product, they were, can we produce the product? And, can we produce enough of it? This philosophy didn't work too badly at the time because most of the products that were being produced were of basic necessity to the customers and there was quite a high level of unfulfilled demand for these products. In this era the way of selling a product to a customer was, once the products had been produced they were given to a sales team to go out and sell directly to the customers. The price of the products was mainly based on the cost of the production of it and normally sold for that price. The production concept carried on into the late 1920's.

In the early 1930's what was known as the 'sales concept' or the 'selling concept' era took over. By this time mass production was quite normal, but the competition had started to increase and the level of unfulfilled demand was not so much any more. The companies now did not only produce the product but they also did the advertising and personal selling to help move their product onto the customers. Now the questions that companies would ask themselves before producing a product were, can we sell the product? And, can we charge enough for it? The sales concept didn't take into consideration whether the customers really needed this product. Its main aims were, basically, only to do better than its competition rather than focusing on the satisfaction of their customers. The sales concept gave marketing a bad name and was thought of as hard selling instead. This was because, most company’s idea of marketing was to do it after the product had actually been developed and produced. This idea that marketing is basically hard selling has meant that quite often marketing is mistaken for sales even nowadays.

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The marketing concept then came in after World War Two. There were now a larger variety of products being sold and hard selling was not working as well as before. Customers seemed to have a larger disposable income, so they could now be a bit fussier about what they were buying. For example they could choose a product that was of better quality, this product may have been more expensive than others but the customer could afford this expense if it was going to last longer. Also the customers needs and wants were starting to change, but this was ...

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