Marketing concept and market orientation

Abstract

Market orientation can be described as a business culture in which all employees are committed to creating maximum value for the customer. Market orientation can also be described as a behaviour that supports the marketing concept. That behaviour is characterized by organization?wide generation of market intelligence regarding current and future customer needs, dissemination of that intelligence across departments, and organization?wide responsiveness to it. This paper focuses on market orientation and marketing philosophies as well as finding out whether public organizations can adopt market orientation and marketing methods. It is the author’s opinion, based on a research of a large public organization, that such an organization can assume further market orientation. But there are still various hindrances, which may be traced to business culture among other things. Furthermore, it appears that partisanship often affects the discussion of public organizations. This may have negative effect on public organizations’ efforts to increase market orientation and adopt marketing methods.