Marketing has evolved through various concepts, each with unique features. The Production Concept focuses on mass production and affordability. The Product Concept emphasizes quality and innovation. The Selling Concept relies on aggressive promotion to boost sales. The Marketing Concept centers on identifying and satisfying customer needs for long-term success. The Societal Marketing Concept goes a step further by balancing company profits, consumer needs, and societal welfare. Lastly, the Relationship Marketing Concept aims to build long-term customer relationships. Each concept reflects a shift in business focus—from product and production to customer and society-centered strategies in modern marketing.
The Exchange Concept
The ‘exchange concept’ of marketing, as the very term indicates, holds that the central idea in marketing is just an exchange of a product between the seller and the buyer. There are firms which operate with the belief that business/marketing is simply a matter of giving a product to someone in exchange for some money from him. It is the most short-sighted view and the least evolved view on marketing. Marketing is much broader than exchange.
The Production Concept
The ‘production concept’ holds that business can be managed by maximisation of production and the resultant lower unit cost and low price. The assumption is that consumers go solely by price. In organisations practising this concept, production dominates the thinking and marketing is a mere appendage to production. While a lower price is certainly advantageous, its role is emphasised. Customers actually go by a variety of considerations besides price. The production concept fails to serve as the right business philosophy.
The Product Concept
For another category of companies, ‘product excellence’ is the supreme thing. They are obsessed with the product, its quality and its features, more than with the customer and his needs. This is the ‘product concept’. It is different from the ‘production concept’. While the production concept banks on high volume of production and low price for growth and profits, the product concept banks on product excellence-improved products, new products and well designed/engineered, good quality products. Despite their quality products, these firms also fail to achieve great marketing as they do not find out what the consumers actually need and what they will gladly accept.
The Sales Concept
Here the firms are oriented heavily to ‘selling’; they believe that marketing’s major concern is to aggressively push the products through high-power personal selling, heavy advertising, large-scale sales promotion and huge price discounts. Firms practising this concept also fail to enjoy lasting customer patronage; when the deals/discounts/push are withdrawn, customers turn away to other offers. These companies assume that selling is synonymous with marketing. In reality, there is a great deal of difference between selling and marketing.
The Marketing Concept
There is also the stratum of firms which believes that customer is central to business. To them, understanding the needs of customers and meeting them through the firm’s product/offer is marketing’s real job. Such firms subscribe to the ‘marketing concept’. Its key attributes are total consumer orientation, integrated management action with marketing as the pivot and emphasis on consumer satisfaction. It is vastly different from the sales concept.
