Successful Organizations Are a Product of Successful Marketing

Successful Organizations are a Product of Successful Marketing
      L. McTier Anderson’s 1987 article, “Charting a Smooth Course for Marketing’s Seven C’s,” provides a practical framework for marketing management.   Anderson suggests that an appreciation of the significance of the 7Cs of the marketing discipline - customer orientation, change, competition, communication, credibility, creativity, and commitment - can help managers choose analytical tools and techniques and develop effective marketing strategies and plans.[i]   As business professionals, one way we can better understand marketing principles, is to study the distinguishing characteristics of successful organizations and how they apply these principles.
Customer Orientation
      Anderson suggested that perhaps the best expression of customer orientation is the “marketing concept,” which is beautifully explained in the quintessential Harvard Business Review article "Marketing Myopia" by Theodore Levitt (1960).   Levitt illustrates the marketing concept with the story of Henry Ford, inventor of the manufacturing assembly line.   Levitt postulates: “We habitually celebrate him for the wrong reason: for his production genius. His real genius was marketing.”[ii]   While it is true that he developed a method of assembly that enabled him to cut costs and make millions of $500 cars, the method was a result of his conclusion that at $500 he could sell millions of cars.   Ford first discovered a need in the market place (affordable motorized transportation) that he could satisfy, for a profit.   Levitt suggested that “a truly marketing-minded firm tries to create value-satisfying goods and services that consumers will want to buy…The seller takes cues from the buyer in such a way that the product becomes a consequence of the marketing effort, not vice versa.”[iii]   In order to achieve this deep understanding of the buyer (a businesses customer), management must strive to build deep -and lasting- relationships...