This article provides an insight to the

marketing management philosophies

(also known as business philosophies)
with real world examples. It is aimed
to aid a firm, which is new to the
application of academic knowledge in
its strategic planning.

MARKETING
MANAGEMENT
PHILOSOPHIES
An Article for a Marketing
Magazine
Madhusha Nanayakkara
Student ID: 0061080261
Subject: MKT5000 - Marketing Management
Lecturer: Rangarirai Chimhundu
Semester: 2015- Semester 03
Date of Submission: 12/07/2015

Source: www.everydayinterviewtips.com

Marketing Management Philosophies

CHOOSING THE RIGHT PATH FORWARD FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Marketing, today, is considered as the art and the science (Kotler & Keller 2012, p. 5) of creating,
communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for the consumers and society at
large (American Marketing Association 2013). Though it has intuitively existed for centuries (Greyser
1997), only since the nineteenth century the firms began to adopt methodological ideologies, known as
business (Blythe 2005, p. 3) or marketing management (Tosun, Okumus & Fyall 2008) philosophies, for
conducting their business.

PRODUCTION PHILOSOPHY
Being one of the oldest, production-philosophy promotes
that the consumers are attracted to products that are
inexpensive and widely available, even though their
needs are not exactly satisfied. Economic conditions like
swarming demand and low income may stimulate the
product-oriented firmsfor example, Ford in the earlytwentieth-century (Hounshell 1984) and modern-day
Maruti Suzuki (Malvankar 2015). These stimuli push the
firms to reduce costs and prices through expansion/massproduction, seeking for economies of scale (Sloman,
Hinde & Garratt 2013) and maintaining higher
productivity (Kotler, Bowen & Makens 2006). However,
it intensely fails when the economy is stable, the supply
adequately pleases the demand and the consumers seek
for products that closely satisfy their needs (Tosun,
Okumus & Fyall 2008).
1

PRODUCT PHILOSOPHY
Product-philosophy, on the contrary, steers a firm to be devoted to a product and improve its quality,
performance and innovative features constantly. The practitioners, such as off-the-shelf software (Braun
1999 ) developers, believe that they can attract a larger market share by offering a product that is ideal
for everybody (or at least many). However, product-oriented firms often fall into a path-dependent
(Hayes 2014) better-mousetrap (Kotler & Keller 2012, p. 40) by fiercely concentrating on such a
product and ignoring the consumers actual needs. This may ultimately lead to customer dissatisfaction
and greater disadvantages.

SELLING PHILOSOPHY
Selling-philosophy moves the firms with overcapacity and
substantial resources to sell anything they produce through
extensive selling and promotion efforts, especially when the
consumers are not willing to buy their products (Blythe 2005,
p. 4). These Firms, such as political parties (O'Shaughnessy &
Henneberg (eds.) 2002, pp. 145-149), often defied when the
promoted product does not meet the consumers elevated
expectations. Nevertheless, such firms may also incur
additional overheads when engaging in its extreme
advertising and promotion activities.

The business setting offered by production, product and selling philosophies can critically be viewed as
instances of Marketing Myopia (Levitt 1960; Grant 1999) where a business is described by rather the
goods and services it provides than the value/benefits the consumer seeks. In mid-twentieth century the
business world encountered a paradigm-shift along with the adoption of marketing philosophy that
edified the consumer-centric ideology.

MARKETING PHILOSOPHY
Marketing-philosophy effectively shifts a firms
attention from its product to its consumer and from
striving to sell its products to the right consumer to
creating, delivering, and communicating right
consumer value to its target market (Kotler & Keller
2012, p. 40). Firms, such as BMW (Grppel 2014),
that adopt this sense-and-response approach
concentrate
on
targeting
specific
market
segmentsgroups of customers with common needs,
understanding all levels of consumer needs (Kotler
& Keller 2012, p. 32), integrating marketing
vertically and horizontally in the organization, and,
therefore, satisfying and retaining its customers.
However, such firms also face critical challenges
such as consumers not knowing what exactly they
need, requiring extensive resources for marketing
research, and continually changing customer needs
and perception.
2

SOCIETAL PHILOSOPHY
Societal-philosophy, which elevates marketing
philosophy and is also referred to as causemarketing or corporate-social-marketing, suggests
that the firms should give additional attention to
the benefits a product offer to the betterment of
society as a whole and the consumers long-run
welfare (Kotler & Armstrong 2006). By confronting
perilous complications such as scarcity of
resources, poverty, environmental deterioration
and over population, peoples societal awareness
grows day-by-day prompting the firms to include
certain non-economic objectives related to social
and environmental sustainability (Drumwright
1996) even at the level of their corporate
missionfor example, UPS (UPS 2014).
21st century challenges the firms today with countless forces, such as globalization, turbulent economic
conditions, political and demographic uncertainty, and the advancement of ICT. In order to prosper over
their mere survival under such turbulence, despite of being small or large, firms are compelled to
implement a much broader and robust business and marketing approach that encompasses the positive
traits of many philosophiesespecially marketing and societal. Kotler and Keller (2012) call it Holistic
Marketing, where the firms are recommended to engage in integrated marketing (by creating,
delivering, and communicating value to the customer rather as a whole than as parts, departments and
individuals), relationship marketing (by aiming to build sustainable long-term relationship with all key
stakeholders and channels: customers, employees, suppliers, distributers and financial community),
Internal marketing (by promoting the need of all employees committing to the firms marketing cause
and selection, appraisal and retention of those who are contributing), and performance marketing in
terms of financial accountability and societal responsibility.

Source: Kotler & Keller (2012)

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