This was the first time, from the mid-19th century to the 1940s, in which all efforts were focused on the production of goods and services. All efforts were dedicated to achieving high product efficiency, which led to the ignorance of the needs and desires of customers, since companies were engaged in the mass production of standard items, so that customers had no other choice. In the United Kingdom, during the 1950s and 1960s, more emphasis was placed on designing and engineering the best products that a sane customer would buy. A popular phrase read: “Build a better mousetrap and the world will make its way to your door.” The key issue in this case was the high level of production, the underlying philosophy was that customers were reluctant to buy and had to be forced to buy.
Although a small number of companies continue to practice sales orientation, the law now protects consumers from more dubious sales techniques, largely due to the consumer movement. In this method, companies plan and make decisions around the needs and desires of customers. It is vital to meet the needs of customers through a coordinated set of activities that includes the actions and functions of all employees in the organization, regardless of the area of the company in which they work. In other words, marketing orientation requires that all members of an organization be customer-oriented and not just the people who work in marketing.
People often confuse and assume that sales and marketing orientation are the same, however, both are different. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller and marketing on the needs of the buyer. The only way to know what works is to be able to measure it. For example, a company is more likely to incur high marketing costs of 26 million reais in the introduction phase.
The maturity stage of the product life cycle is the most cost-effective stage, the time when production and marketing costs decrease. While a drug may be just entering its growth phase, competition can be adversely affected by competition when its patent ends, regardless of what phase it is in. Throughout the different stages of the product life cycle, a company implements strategies and changes depending on the way in which the market receives a good. In 1965, Theodore Levitt, professor of marketing, wrote in the Harvard Business Review that the innovator has the most to lose because many truly new products fail in the first phase of their life cycle, the introductory phase.
For example, a company may decide to reallocate the time of market staff to products that are in the introduction or growth stages. OLED televisions are in their maturity phase, on-demand programming is in a growth phase, DVDs are in decline and the VCR has died out.
