Vivekananda University

The current millennium has unfolded new business rules, the most significant of them being that past history or experience in a given product market is no indicator of future success. Market leadership cannot be taken for granted because customer loyalty does not exist anymore. In an era of global trends defining  buying decisions, the customer today has a much wider choice; a buyer does not have to adhere only to the locally available brands/services. Given the plethora  of television channels, apart from internet marketing and teleshopping, this millennium’s customer wants and enjoys being wooed by marketers. Over a period,  wooing and cajoling the customer will only intensify.

In the traditional selling concept, the main strategy of the company is to find customers for the product manufactured by them and “somehow” convince the  customer into buying their product. The approach is through aggressive sales & sales promotion tools with a lot of emphasis on closing the sale even if it means  cuGing down on prices.

As a contrast to this, the Marketing concept emphasizes the importance of consumer needs & behaviour. The approach is to first understand the consumer needs  & then approach him with an objective of satisfying him as the most important pursuit. The emphasis is on maximizing profits through consumer satisfaction  rather than through just sales maximization. The aim of marketing is to understand the consumer and his needs so well that the product or service so developed  should sell by itself. All that is required is to make customer satisfaction as an integral part of the company strategy.

In this situation, the knowledge of marketing concepts has become unbelievably valuable to the organisations to fight it out in a churning marketplace. This has  resulted in a huge demand for online MBA marketing programs and the career growth of marketing professionals has been exponential in most organisations.  Most CEOs and senior management executives in organisations in highly competitive markets are invariably from marketing backgrounds.