What is Customer and competitor orientation?

Answer 1

This type of question normally deals with marketing and marketing research strategies.

Customer Orientated Marketing & Research

This is the most common approach to performing research marketing to find out which products a company can find a customer or consumer base that satisfies a customer need. Upon a business decision to move ahead, the next step is marketing the product and ensuring that there is an efficient flow of products from the company to the customer.

Companies have religiously followed the recommendations of their marketing experts and more often than not, they have seen millions of dollars wasted as they must readjust the tactics. This is because in so many situations the "customer orientated" research process fails to make the mark, or to say it another way, the plan has "missed the mark." The problem is not the customer, the problem is the competition.This is because, in part, every other company has saturated its marketing research with customer oriented marketing research. As an example, General Motors knows the consumer well, the problem is that so does Toyota, Nissan and Mazda.

Competitor Orientation

Here a different approach that need more attention. The idea is to study the competition and look for its weak points, then launch a marketing attack upon this weakness. Here is a rather old example of this. For years and years, Coca-Cola dominated the soda market, not only in colas, but overall in all soft beverages. Pepsi-Cola saw that Coke was not as sweet as it could be. Coke did not waver from its secret formula and proceeded very smugly with its No. 1 brand. Pepsi provided what Coke did not provide, a sweet tooth product that has made it a No.2 soft drink product.