The Role of Marketing in Achieving Organisational Goals

Introduction

The marketing department is one of an integral part of a company. The marketing department deals with researching the market for the company and provide them with effective strategies, increase the sales and do effective promotion of a company. In this report, the role of marketing in achieving organisational goals and the market orientation will be discussed in brief. Being market-oriented helps a company to satisfy the needs and demand of their customers. This is a very effective way of developing products and services.

Discuss the role of marketing in achieving organisational goals including delivering perceived value to customers.

The marketing department in the telecommunication industry has a very diverse role. Marketing plays a very important role in achieving the goals of an organisation. The ways in which marketing can help a telecommunication industry to achieve its goals are discussed below.

Widens the market

As per the case study, one of the main tasks of marketing professional in a company is to carry out market research. The market research conducted by the markets contains information on the consumers and the market’s ability to supply the growing demand of customers. By generating an idea of the market, the marketing professional can help a company to widen its market share. The marketing department of telecommunication gathers data on the pricing structure of its competitors (Bailey et al., 2016). The company can widen its market by setting the prices of its competitor as a benchmark and provide a cheaper price for their service. Customers are easily attracted to low priced product or service. It is the job of the marketing professional to do brand awareness. Brand awareness refers to the people recognising a brand by seeing its name, logo or slogan. In order to increase brand awareness, a company has to do effective advertising. Telecommunication companies can advertise their brand using articles, television, social media and newspaper.

Delivering perceived value to customers

Customers are the most important asset of a company. A telecommunication company is sure to fail if it is not able to provide their customers with valuable products and services. Communication is one of the most important things in today's world. As per the case study, every kind of work requires effective communication so that information is passed on hassle-free, which is why customers do not compromise of the service provided by a telecommunication company. Customers can easily change the telecommunication services if they feel it is not providing the value that a company promised (Kyriakopoulos et al., 2016).

Innovation

Technology and innovation is a major factor affecting the image of a telecommunication company. Changes in customer needs, government regulations and competitive environment telecommunication companies have to evolve their services with the involvement of technology in their services. Apple is the best example of a mobile company that has changed the way that people think about mobile devices. The company has developed devices by converging internet facilities, telecommunication services and software technology in single devices. Other multinational telecommunication companies are also trying to innovate their products and services to become customer oriented. Multinational telecommunication companies can device strategic guidelines for themselves to achieve the innovation goals. Customer are very excited of the changing technological environment and are looking for products that are innovative and can be useful them in their diurnal activities. Therefore, a company will be able to attract and retain customers by innovating their products and services with the changing market and technology environment.

Economic growth

The job of the marketing department is to create demand for the company. When the demand of the company grows, the company has to match its supply with the demand. In such cases, companies have to hire more employees for the various departments in a telecommunication company (Alghizzawi, 2019). This can boost the industrial growth due to a surge in employment opportunities. By doing so, the marketing department raises the living standard of people and ultimately boosts the economic growth of the country. A boost in the economy can also help the telecommunication company to achieve its goals. Since the living standard is, increased people will prefer using a premium service.

Illustrate what it means to be 'market-orientated'.

Figure 1: Market orientation

(Source: Inspired from Kiessling et al., 2016)

A business is said to be market-oriented when it focuses on the needs and demands of the consumers and develops products and services to fulfil them. The market-oriented companies consider the demands as a critical factor for the R&D department. It may seem apparent; however, market orientation proponents claim that the contrary is the traditional approach to product growth (Kiessling et al., 2016). In other words, marketing campaigns concentrate on creating key selling attributes to support established goods instead of developing products with the features that customers claim they want.

Market orientation depends on the needs of customers. The marketing team helps the company with performing market research on the customers. The research may contain key information of the customers such as their concerns and preferences. A company can also gather information by conducting surveys and taking the information directly from their customers. It is a very effective way to understand the needs and desires of the customers. The company must also keep a track of the changing trends in the market. Preferably, an awareness of these trends will help the operations/production department to satisfy or even predict customer needs. Organisations could also promote changes that the customer was not conscious of being a choice.

The company can then develop products and services by considering the profitability of the company. Market-oriented companies can also have a competitive advantage over other organisations in the market. With ever-increasing global demand and change in trends market, oriented companies stay a step ahead of the rest (Kohli, 2017).

A company that focuses on the needs and demands of their customers constantly try to improve the quality of their products and service. The company develops its products and service in such a way that it solves the concerns raised by their customers. Thus, market-oriented companies ensure customer satisfaction. A satisfied customer is can help a company to boost its sales by word-of-mount. Satisfied customers usually tend to tell the experience to their friends and family, which increases the profitability of the company.

Companies have to incorporate market orientation strategy in all of their departments. It has to make sure it becomes an integral part of the corporate culture of the company. Implementing market orientation in all of the departments of the company can help them to retain their customers. It is also possible to boost growth in the demographics of the company.

Telecommunication companies can become market-oriented by solving the problems of the customers. Customers usually face problems in reaching their relatives or friends over a phone call from remote places. The company that can solve this problem for their customers can see a major rise in their sales and revenue (Mahmoud et al., 2016). The concept of internet was first introduced in the 1990s. The 1990s was a period that saw formation of many technology innovation concepts in the form of widespread commercial diffusion. Such external innovation drove Apple to develop app store that would help people to download various applications with the help of internet.

Delivering quality products to its customers, Amazon solved the problem of many consumers. No matter what the delivery cost of shipping a product is a customer that is in an immediate need of the product would may maximum charges for getting the product devolved. Customers were also able to order products from across the country, which they were not able to find locally.

Discuss how being market-oriented affects strategy formulation, implementation, and planning.

Since market-oriented companies form products and services bases on the preference of customers there are many factors that they can consider to form an effective strategy. The telecommunication industry is very dynamic because of which companies can consider many external environmental driven changes for planning and strategy formulation. Some of the external environment driven changes are external innovation, regulatory change, customer change and competitor strategy change (Ghezzi et al., 2014). Due to these changes, the telecommunication companies have to continuously change their strategy. Implementing the same, strategy cannot work for any company since trends in the market are continuously changing.

External development applies at the macro level to promotional and technical divergences, that is to say, at the level of the nation, market or industry. It involves, for example, the launch of Apple's App Store delivery model or the advent of primary computing systems for smartphones and tablets. Any company that is lagging being on the innovation may lose their customers and it can affect them in a very negative way (Meng et al., 2016). Telecommunication companies, therefore, have to always keep a track of the innovation in the market. It will help them in planning and strategy formulation for getting the same technology for them. Getting the technology before any other competitor in the market can be very beneficial for the company.

The telecommunication industry also has many government regulations that they have to follow. Any market-oriented company also has to follow government regulation and if there is any kind of changes in it. There are changes in the acts of telecommunication or radio communication. Many time government form regulations by considering the public interest, necessity and convenience. Customers prefer to buy the services from a telecommunication industry, which follow all the regulation that the government has issued. These regulations are usually for the wellbeing of the people and any company that does not follow these shows the customer that the company does not care about its safety. Market-oriented telecommunication companies have to implement these regulations and provide services to their customers.

Formerly telecommunication companies target only working professionally as their main customers. However, as time passed the need for telecommunication became mandatory for people of every age. Students these days need telecommunication services so that they can contact their parents, teachers or relatives in case of an emergency (Davis and Farrell, 2016).

Italian multinational organisations have to focus on the convergence of telecommunication as well as telecommunication services of the same devices. In order to maintain their focus Italian MNO have to manage three areas that are customer relationship, customer realisation & innovation and infrastructure management. The Italian multinational organisations can make the use of “Smart Pipe” analogy where to maintain their focus by exploring the possibilities of network functionality and the management of service quality as a means of competitive edge. For example, as per the case study an idea was proposed that a company can improve the speed of internet and data services by managing data traffic.

Conclusion

It can be concluded from the report that the marketing department plays a very important role in helping a company to be market-oriented. The marketing team does the research and survey for market-oriented companies, which helps them to know customer preference. By knowing customer preference, a market-oriented company can develop products and services that fulfil their demand and needs.

Reference list

Alghizzawi, M., 2019. The role of digital marketing in consumer behaviour: A survey. Int. J. Inf. Technol. Lang. Stud, 3(1), pp.24-31.

Bailey, A.A., Albassami, F. and Al-Meshal, S., 2016. The roles of employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment in the internal marketing-employee bank identification relationship. International Journal of Bank Marketing.

Davis, J.A. and Farrell, M.A., 2016. The market-oriented university: Transforming higher education. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Ghezzi, A., Cortimiglia, M. and Frank, A., 2014. Strategy And Business Model Design In Dynamic Telecommunications Industries: A Study On Italian Mobile Network Operators. [online] siencedirect.com. Available at: <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0040162514002765?via%3Dihub> [Accessed 21 January 2021].

Kiessling, T., Isaksson, L. and Yasar, B., 2016. Market orientation and CSR: Performance implications. Journal of Business Ethics, 137(2), pp.269-284.

Kohli, A.K., 2017. Market orientation in a digital world. Global business review, 18(3_suppl), pp.S203-S205.

Kyriakopoulos, K., Hughes, M. and Hughes, P., 2016. The role of marketing resources in radical innovation activity: antecedents and payoffs. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 33(4), pp.398-417.

Mahmoud, M.A., Blankson, C., Owusu-Frimpong, N., Nwankwo, S. and Trang, T.P., 2016. Market orientation, learning orientation and business performance. International Journal of Bank Marketing.

Meng, M., Mander, S., Zhao, X. and Niu, D., 2016. Have market-oriented reforms improved the electricity generation efficiency of China's thermal power industry? An empirical analysis. Energy, 114, pp.734-741.