Market Orientation

Market orientation is a company philosophy focused on discovering and meeting the needs and desires of its customers through its product mix. Unlike past marketing strategies that concentrated on establishing selling points for existing products, market orientation works in reverse, attempting to tailor products to meet the demands of customers. In essence, market orientation can be thought of as a coordinated marketing campaign between a company and its customers.

The following could be consider as the benefits provided if an enterprise uses Market Orientation as their strategy: 

* It focuses on Customer satisfaction.

* It further focuses on constantly monitoring what the customers' needs.

* It provides the company an advantage against it's competitors.

* It is a constant process by which data acquired from by all the levels of organisation are analyzed to understand the need of customer on a regular basis.

It is simple to use as it can be used by all kind of businesses, for example:

1) A steel utensil manufacturer may conduct survey's from it's traders and distributors regarding the needs of the customer and manufacture products accordingly. It has been observed that due to the use of steel products in induction cookers, etc. The various kind of demands of the utensils which could be used for such cookers have increased. 

2) KFC is one more example, their specialty in chicken products in famous all around the world. However depending on the needs of Indian customer's for Veg products. They started providing veg products also in India.

3) Cafe Coffee Day could also be considered as a great example of analyzing what the market needs and providing products based on the market.    

You may have come across various cases when the company's has failed to understand the need of customer's or consumer's or user's and ended up losing their customer base. Few of the best example being:

1) BlackBerry

2) Orkut

3) Nokia

Further, in a macro dynamics our country is focusing more and more in Service Oriented business. To substantiate the same the following  are the details:

  1) India’s technology and BPM sector has a growth rate of  23.72 per cent as per  Nasscom Techsci Research. As we all know IT sector is mainly depends on what the customer needs. All the apps, ERP's,etc are developed to satisfy the customer's needs.

2) Online food ordering and delivery service firm Swiggy, owned by Bundl Technologies Private Limited, has raised US$ 15 million in a fresh funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners along with existing investors SAIF Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Accel Partners, and Apoletto Asia. It reflects to the fact that depending the customer's need of food delivery the company developed the app.

3) Taxi service aggregator Ola plans to double operations to 200 cities in current fiscal year. The company, which is looking at small towns for growth, also plans to invest in driver eco-system, such as training centers and technology upgrade, besides adding 1,500 to 2,000 women drivers as part of its pink cab service by women for women. It reflects the fact that the need to own the car as compare to using the rent a cab facility was targeted by the company.

Hence, it could be said that market orientation in this competitive market is very important to acquire market share.