Market Orientation

Market orientation:

Market orientation gets the right product: product orientation gets the product right

It express a marketing perception which put the customer's needs in the center of all firm's activities. Market orientation composes of five behavioral characteristics;

1) Customer Focus: understanding the potential customer needs in order to create an added value for him on a continuance basis.

2) Competitor Orientation: knowing the strength and weaknesses as well as capabilities and strategies of key competitors.

3) Inter Functional Coordination: coordinating use of the firm resources for creating high added value to target customers.

4) Long-term focus: should plan to provide services and products for more than 5 years.

5) Market Intelligence System: a systematic research approach to gather new market information through qualitative and quantitative methods; and a process for analyzing information for decision making purposes.

Key moderators are:

a) Geographic: which include the region of the market, country: to know its policies, standards, rules & regulations for how to enter it. Finally, the place of consumers whether they are in a far town, their location that they are hard or easy to be reached.

b) Demographic: age of consumers, whether they are young who buy a product depending a lot on how lit looks not like elders who seek durability and functionality. Sex: whether targeting males or females, how they perceive and think individually. Family size in that region or place, do they have few children (2 – 3) like Europe or lots of them (6- 10) like Middle East & Asia. What’s the income per person/family, is it high that can afford luxury service and products or is it low that can help to live a decent life.

c) Psychographic: lifestyle of consumers on how they live and for what they approach new products/services. What are the consumer’s beliefs on certain brands? How their attitudes? Are they aggressive, firm or lean! This helps an organization...