Which of the following best describes a company that follows a social marketing orientation?

Social marketing is an approach used to develop activities aimed at changing or maintaining people’s behaviour for the benefit of individuals and society as a whole. 

Combining ideas from commercial marketing and the social sciences, social marketing is a proven tool for influencing behaviour in a sustainable and cost-effective way.

It helps you to decide:

• Which people to work with
• What behaviour to influence
• How to go about it
• How to measure it

Social marketing is not the same as social media marketing. Find out more.

Approach

Social marketing is a systematic and planned process. It follows six steps

Behaviour 

The goal of social marketing is always to change or maintain how people behave – not what they think or how aware they are about an issue. If your goal is only to increase awareness or knowledge, or change attitudes, you are not doing social marketing.

Benefits people and society 

This is the value – perceived or actual – as it is defined by the people who are targeted by a social marketing intervention. It is not what is assumed to benefit them by the organisation that is trying to encourage the behaviour change. 

A social marketing approach

Even if you don’t take social marketing any further, just considering these four questions will add value to your projects and policies.

1. Do I really understand my target audience and see things from their perspective? 
2. Am I clear about what I would like my target audience to do? 
3. For my target audience, do the benefits of doing what I would like them to do outweigh the costs or barriers to doing it? 
4. Am I using a combination of activities in order to encourage people to achieve the desired action? 

How social marketing helps 

Policy: social marketing helps to ensure policy is based on an understanding of people’s lives, making policy goals realistic and achievable. Policy example: water rationing in Jordan

Strategy: social marketing enables you to target your resources cost-effectively, and select interventions that have the best impact over time. Strategy example:  lung disease strategy in England

Implementation and delivery: social marketing enables you to develop products, services and communications that fit people’s needs and motivations. Delivery example: child car seats in Texas

Find out more

• Visit our Social Marketing Planning Guide

• Social marketing vs social media marketing

Market orientation is an approach to business that prioritizes identifying the needs and desires of consumers and creating products and services that satisfy them. Companies that have a market orientation consider the opinions and needs of their target market as a critical component of their research and development (R&D) for new products.

It may sound obvious, but advocates of market orientation argue that the conventional approach to product development is the opposite. That is, marketing strategies focus on establishing key selling points to promote existing products rather than designing products that have the qualities consumers say they want.

• Market orientation is a strategic focus on identifying consumer needs and desires in order to define new products to be developed.
• Established businesses like Amazon and Coca-Cola use market orientation principles to improve or expand their products or services.
• Even consumer demands that are impractical today can inform long-range decision-making.

Market orientation is a customer-centered approach to product design. It involves market research aimed at determining what consumers view as their immediate needs, primary concerns, or personal preferences within a particular product category.

Companies may also employ additional data analysis to reveal trends and consumer desires that are not specifically expressed. A knowledge of these trends ideally can help product developers meet or even anticipate consumer needs. They may even inspire improvements that the consumer was not aware of as being an option.

This allows a company to focus its product development efforts on the characteristics that are most in-demand. With an increasingly global economy and the proliferation of choices for consumers, companies that adapt to a market orientation may benefit from a competitive advantage over other companies.

Market orientation often includes improvements in customer service and product support geared to solving concerns raised by consumers. This helps ensure customer satisfaction remains high with the company as a whole and promotes brand loyalty and positive word-of-mouth advertising.

To be successful, companies need to ensure that all departments adopt and promote the market orientation approach so that it becomes an integral part of the corporate culture. When effective, market orientation can help a company increase customer retention and propel growth in new demographics.

At times, market orientation may reveal customer desires that are simply not cost-effective or practical to implement. The business then must determine how to meet customer expectations in the best way possible.

At the very least, impractical ideas may inform long-term development strategies. Options that are not cost effective today may become quite possible down the line due to changes in technology, science, regulation or other market conditions.

Development focused on market orientation puts consumers' desires first, creating the product around their expressed needs and wants. This contrasts with product orientation, a business philosophy that emphasizes getting the consumer to become aware of and like the features and benefits of a particular product.

Product differentiation often goes hand-in-hand with a product orientation approach. With this approach, the company employs an advertising strategy that aims at clearly identifying the attributes that distinguish a brand from its competitors.

Sales orientation focuses on persuading the consumer into immediate action through means such as online ads, social media, television commercials, in-store demonstrations, or direct response marketing.

Any or all of these approaches may be required for a successful marketing strategy, but most businesses focus on one or a few as their primary focus.

Amazon is an example of a market-oriented company. As it has grown and developed, it has consistently added processes and features that clearly address concerns and desires expressed by consumers.

For example, many consumers, especially city dwellers, worry about getting packages delivered when they're not at home. The company responded with Amazon Locker, a network of self-service pickup boxes.

Delivery charges, no matter how reasonable, are a chief irritant to consumers, and a reason to buy locally instead of ordering online. Amazon Prime charges an annual fee for the free delivery of most of its products.

Coca-Cola is another company that is famous for its market orientation. Considerable research goes into identifying new flavors that consumers will actually like, such as wild strawberry and lime. But those new flavors won't help Coca-Cola address the increasing health consciousness of consumers. That's why the company acquired brands including Dasani, Honest Tea, Smartwater, Simply Orange, Minute Maid, and Vitaminwater.