The Societal Marketing Concept

The societal marketing concept holds that the organization should determine the needs, wants, and interests of tar get markets and deliver the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than competitors in a way that maintains or improves the consumer's and the society's well-being. The societal marketing concept is the newest of the five marketing management philosophies.

The societal marketing concept questions whether the pure marketing concept is adequate in an age of environmental problems, resource shortages, rapid population growth, world hunger and poverty, and neglected social services. It asks if the firm that senses, serves, and satisfies individual wants is always doing what is best for consumers and society in the long run. The pure marketing concept overlooks possible conflicts between short-run consumer wants and long-run consumer welfare.

The societal marketing concept calls upon marketers cobalance three considerations in setting their marketing policies. Originally, companies based their marketing decisions largely on short-run company profit. Then they began to recognize the long-run importance of satisfying consumer wants, and this recognition introduced the marketing concept. Now they are beginning to think of society's interests when making decisions. The societal marketing concept calls for balancing all three considerations-company profits, consumer wants, and society's interests. Many companies have made large sales and profit gains by practicing the societal marketing concept.

Words and Expressions

bring down v - снижать(ся) (о ценах и т. п.)

call for v - требовать, предусматривать, нуждаться

feature n - особенность, характерная черта; характерная особенность

hold v - полагать, считать; рассматривать; придерживаться (доктрины, мнения, взгляда и т. п.)

marketing concept - концепция маркетинга

performance n - характеристика (работы машины и т. п.); эксплуатационные качества

product concept - концепция совершенствования товара

production concept - концепция совершенствования производства

selling concept - концепция интенсификации продаж

societal marketing concept - концепция социально-этического маркетинга

unsought adj - непрошеный; незатребованный

 

MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONS

Management plays a vital role in any business or organized activity. Management is composed of a team of managers who have charge of the organization at all levels. Their duties include making sure company objectives are met and seeing that the business operates efficiently. Regardless of the specific job, most managers perform four basic functions. These management functions are planning, organizing, directing, and controlling.

Planning involves determining overall company objectives and deciding how these goals can best be achieved. Managers evaluate alternative plans before choosing a specific course of action and then check to see that the chosen plan fits into the objectives established at higher organizational levels.

Planning is listed as the first management function because the others depend on it. However, even as managers move on to perform other managerial functions, planning continues as goals and alternatives are further evaluated and revised.

Organizing, the second management function, is the process of putting the plan into action. This involves allocating resources, especially human resources, so that the overall objectives can be attained. In this phase managers decide on the positions to be create choosing the right person for the right job, may also be included as part of the organizing function.

Third is the day-to-day direction and supervision of employees. In directing, managers guide, teach, and motivate workers so that they reach their potential abilities and at the same time achieve the company coals that were established in the planning process. Effective direction, or supervision, by managers requires ongoing communication with employees.

In the last management function, controlling, managers evaluate how well company objectives are being met. In order to complete this evaluation, managers must look at the objectives established in the planning phase and at how well the tasks assigned in the directing phase are being completed. If major problems exist and goals are not being achieved, then changes need to be made in the company's organizational or managerial structure. In making changes managers might have to go back and replan, reorganize, and redirect.

In order to adequately and efficiently perform these management functions, managers need interpersonal, organizational, and technical skills. Although all four functions are managerial duties, the importance of each may vary depending on the situation. Effective managers meet the objectives of the company through a successful combination of planning, organizing, directing, and controlling.

MANAGEMENT AND HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT

Managers perform various functions, but one of the most important and least understood aspects of their job is proper utilization of people. Research reveals that worker performance is closely related to motivation; thus keeping employees motivated is an essential component of good management. In a business context, motivation refer to the stimulus that direct the behavior of workers toward the company goals. In order to motivate workers to achieve company goals, managers must be aware of their needs.

Many managers believe workers will be motivated to achieve organizational goals by satisfying their fundamental need for material survival. These needs include a good salary, safe working conditions, and job security. While absence of these factors results in poor moral and dissatisfaction, studies have shown that their presence results only in maintenance of existing attitudes and work performance. Although important, salary working conditions, and job security don’t provide the primary motivation for many workers in highly industrialized societies, especially at the professional or technical levels.

Increased motivation is more likely to occur when work meets the needs of individuals for learning, self realization, and personal growth. By responding to personal needs – the desire for responsibility, recognition, growth, promotion, and more interesting work – managers have altered condition in the workplace and consequently, many employees are motivated to perform more effectively.

In an attempt to both the fundamental or personal needs of workers, innovative management approaches, such as job enrichment and job enlargement, have been adopted in many organizations. Job enrichment gives workers authority in making decision related to planning and doing their work. A worker might assume responsibility for scheduling work-flow, checking quality of work produced, or making sure deadlines are met. Job enlargement increases the number of tasks workers perform by allowing them to rotate positions or by giving them responsibility for doing several job. Rather than assembling just the component of a automobile, factory workers might be grouped together and given responsibility for assembling the entire fuel system.

By improving the quality of work life through satisfaction of fundamental and personal employee needs, managers attempt to direct the behaviour of toward the company goal.

Managing Productivity

Productivity has become a day-to-day concern for managers because productivity indicates the overall efficiency of their firms. The unit of output can be anything:

ü money

ü units of products

ü customers served

ü whatever is meaningful to the organization

What managers attempt to do is to produce more output with less input. It means making more from what you have and working smarter rather than harder.

Today’s work force devotes only 40 hours to manufacturing. The other 60 hours go to completing forms, filing reports, processing payrolls and exchanging information, etc. Managers today must make some important choices. On the one hand, they are faced with bad news about foreign competition, increased costs of energy and raw materials, increasing government regulation and the changing nature of the labour force. On the other hand, technology and capital investment are not always the optimal solution to productivity problems. This means that better management may be the key to improved productivity.

The One-Minute Manager was written by Kenneth Blanchard, a professor of management at the University of Massachusetts, and the internationally known management consultant, which co-author Spencer Johnson, a medical doctor and the author of dozens of books in medicine and psychology. In the firs six months, more than half a million copies were sold.

The purpose of this book is to propose a new management style that consists of three steps, each of which takes one minute to perform. The first step is one-minute goal setting, each in which manager and employee agree on goals and transfer them to written form. Each goal is to be written in 250 words or less on one piece of paper so that it can be read in one minute. The second step is one-minute praising in which the manager congratulates the employee for a job well-done, tells him or her specifically what was good about performance and what it means for the organization. After that a handshake and some encouragement bring the one-minute praising to a conclusion. The third step is a one-minute reprimand in which the manager tells the employee specifically what was wrong with performance and how he or she fells about it, taking care to separate the value of the employee from the one mistake that instigated the criticism.

MARKETING PLANNING

STRATEGIC PLANNING

Strategic planning is the process of developing and maintaining a strategic fit between the organisation's goals and capabilities and its changing market opportunities. It relies on developing a clear company mission, supporting objectives, a sound business portfolio, and co-ordinated functional strategies.

At the corporate level, the company first defines its overall purpose and mission. This mission is then turned into detailed supporting objectives that guide the whole company. Next, top management decides what portfolio of businesses and products is best for the company, and how much support to give each one. Each business and product unit must in turn develop detailed marketing and other functional plans that support the company-wide plan.

When management senses that the organisation is drifting, it must renew its search for purpose. It is time to ask: What is our business? Who is the customer? What is value to the customer? What will our business be? What should our business be?

Companies traditionally defined their business in product terms such as. 'We manufacture video games', or in technological terms such as, 'We are a chemical-processing firm'. But some years ago, 'Theodore Levitt proposed that market definitions stated in terms of particular customer groups or needs were better.

Management should avoid making its mission too narrow or too broad. Mission statements should be specific, realistic, and motivating. As an illustration, the International Minerals and Chemical Corporation is in many businesses including the fertilizer business. The fertilizer division does not say that its mission is to produce fertilizer. Instead, it says that its mission is to 'fight world hunger'. This mission leads to a hierarchy of business objectives, marketing objectives and, finally, marketing strategy.

The mission of lighting world hunger leads to the company's prime business objective of 'increasing agricultural productivity'. This in turn leads to 'researching new fertilizers which promise higher yields'. But research is expensive and requires improved profits to plough back into research programmes. So a major objective becomes 'to improve profits'.

Profits can be improved by increasing sales or reducing costs. Sales can be increased by enlarging the company's share of the US market and by entering foreign markets. These became the company's current marketing objectives.

Marketing strategies must be developed to support these marketing objectives. To raise its US market share, the company will increase its product's availability and promotion. To enter new foreign markets, the company will cut prices and call on large farms abroad. These are the broad marketing strategies.

MARKET RESEARCH