Have you ever come across a conversation with someone in the Marketing Industry trying to convince you that Marketing is everything. Well guess what? Marketing is everything! The official definition the American Marketing Association uses to describe Marketing is “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large”. So pretty much it actually is everything and once we understand this, we should start taking advantage of it. There are many aspects that Marketing has but if we were to narrow them down to the most important ones we would conclude to five concepts. These five concepts simply explain how companies & corporations treat the marketing of their products & services and how they tend to reach their audience.

Production Concept

In this concept enterprises offer their customers products that are available in large amounts via many selling points and in low cost. It is commonly believed that this concept is more operation oriented meaning that companies focus more on enhancing their operations from supplies, to production to finally delivering the product than focusing on promoting it in the right way. This concept is considered to be one of the oldest in the industry and is proved to produce the less results today.

Product Concept

By adopting this concept companies decide to focus more on the aspects of their products such as high quality, high performance and innovative features. This concept believes in human psychology and customer loyalty and runs under the impression that consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service repetitiously once they have been satisfied by its benefits.

Selling Concept

The Selling Concept is the most common concept in the industry and is vastly used by many enterprises. In this concept companies decide to aggressively promote or sell their products and services without focusing on differentiating their strategies. This concept today still works but its popularity goes down day by day because consumers are getting smarter and the way to influence them has to be smarter.

Marketing Concept

The Marketing Concept focuses on the needs and wants of small niche target markets as well as delivering higher value than their competitors. In this case the conception is that companies should focus on establishing a strong presence in small audiences turning their customers into advocates and then moving on to bigger markets. This concept seems to gain more fans day by day and is proven to produce satisfying results.

Societal Marketing Concept

Finally the Societal Marketing concept is exactly like the Marketing Concept with a small differentiation. This concept does focus on the needs and wants of small niche target markets and delivering higher value than its competitors, but it also focuses on preserving the consumer’s and society’s well being. It has a more social character and the strategy behind it is to sell products & services by enhancing the impact they make on both individuals and society.

These are the Five Marketing Concepts and the explanation of each one of them in simple words. Companies & corporations all around the world use one or even more of these strategies as the foundation of their marketing. Make sure to understand which one fits your enterprise or organisation better and then implement them in the right way. There is no right or wrong solution, so don’t be afraid to apply useful features of different concepts tailored to your needs, just improvise, get results, evaluate, make the necessary changes and repeat.