This orientation holds that consumers will favor those products that offer the most quality, performance, or innovative features.  Managers focusing on this concept concentrate on making superior products and improving them over time. They assume that buyers admire well-made products and can appraise quality and performance.  However, these managers are sometimes caught up in a love affair with their product and do not realize what the market needs.  Management might commit the “better-mousetrap” fallacy, believing that a better mousetrap will lead people to beat a path to its door. 

This is another common business orientation. It holds that consumers and businesses, if left alone, will ordinarily not buy enough of the selling company’s products. The organization must, therefore, undertake an aggressive selling and promotion effort. This concept assumes that consumers typically show buying inertia or resistance and must be coaxed into buying. It also assumes that the company has a whole battery of effective selling and promotional tools to stimulate more buying. Most firms practice the selling concept when they have overcapacity. Their aim is to sell what they make rather than make what the market wants.

The marketing concept holds- “achieving organizational goals depends on knowing the needs and wants of target markets and delivering the desired satisfactions better than competitors do”. Here marketing management takes a “customer first” approach. Under the marketing concept, customer focus and value are the routes to achieve sales and profits. The marketing concept is a customer-centered “sense and responds” philosophy. The job is not to find the right customers for your product but to find the right products for your customers. The marketing concept and the selling concepts are two extreme concepts and totally different from each other.

This concept holds that the organization’s task is to determine the needs, wants, and interests of target markets and to deliver the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than competitors (this is the original Marketing Concept). Additionally, it holds that this all must be done in a way that preserves or enhances the consumer’s and the society’s well-being. This Orientation arose as some questioned whether the Marketing Concept is an appropriate philosophy in an age of environmental deterioration, resource shortages, explosive population growth, world hunger and poverty, and neglected social services.