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A market orientation for your small business is an organizational strategy dedicated to meeting the needs of consumers. All your business's strategies and product developments revolve around this desire. A market-oriented business strategy has advantages in pleasing consumers, but the move can also have large developmental costs if you do not control your spending early in the life of your small business.
Responding to DemandA market-oriented approach to your small business reacts to what your customers want. This eliminates the guessing and forecasting associated with attempting to predict product trends and consumer demands for goods. When your customers tell you what they want to buy, you know you're always providing a product with a ready supply of consumers who will make purchases. This allows you to streamline your product development team and lower your creation costs to eliminate products for which consumer demand or market need doesn't exist.
Building Customer ValueBuilding customer value through a market-oriented approach to your small business allows you to increase loyalty to your brand and develop repeat customers. Brand loyalty alone is a distinct advantage in the market because it develops a customer base resistant to attempts from competitors to attract business through more lucrative offers, including temporarily lower prices and introductory incentives. When customers feel that you as a business owner are prizing customer demands for high quality and value above all else, they will reward your small business with repeat sales and larger purchases.
Extensive and Expensive ResearchTo effectively implement a market orientation for your small business, you must invest in extensive marketing research. This is necessary to gauge consumer needs in the market and develop products to match those needs. Conducting this research takes time and may require you to hire a private marketing firm to oversee the project. The costs of hiring a private marketing firm can be expensive, depending on the depth of research required to determine the needs of customers in your local marketplace.
Increasing Value Increases Cost
Increasing value for your customer base also increases the production costs of your goods and services. For example, choosing to offer product warranties as a response to consumer demand requires you to either have an existing maintenance staff on hand to make repairs or hire an outside company to handle all warranty-eligible maintenance. This can raise your costs to a level where it's no longer profitable for you as a small business owner to continue a market-oriented approach. Your small business could go under even as it's proving to be a success in the market.
Its always good to know your market before any launch of product /service , as you can have knowledge on competition market share, trends and know would be your targeted audience for this particular product or service.
It will also help to study priceing strategy based on market how its been fairing in last quarter or month and it will surely to do Sales Forecast.