Four different orientations organisations have towards customers

Orientation Description Production orientation Customers will buy whatever we produce – our job is to make as many as we can. (Demand exceeds available supply.)

Product orientation, a variant of production orientation

Add more features to the product – demand will pick up. Such firms do not research what customers actually want.

Sales orientation Customer are naturally sales resistant so the product must be sold actively and aggressively and customers must be persuaded to buy them.

Marketing orientation Societal orientation

The key task of the organization is to determine the needs, wants and values of a target market and to adapt the organisation to delivering the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than its competitors.

This holds that a company should make marketing decisions by considering consumers’ wants, company’s requirements, and society’s long- term interest. An organisation’s task is to determine the needs, wants and interest of a target market and to deliver the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than competitors in the way that preserves or enhances the society’s well-being.

Relationship orientation This is a facet of customer relationship management which focuses on customer loyalty and long term customer engagement rather than shorter-term goals like customer acquisition and individual sales. The goal here is to create strong, even emotional, customer connections to a brand that can lead to ongoing business, fee word- of- mouth promotion and information from customers that can generate leads.