Selling vs Marketing

Selling concept applies where the company makes aggressive selling effort by utilizing large scale promotions and offers. Selling believes that customers will not buy goods and services unless the company makes large scale promotional offers and if the organization does not offer surely competitors will offer and drag customers.  Sellers argue that buyers naturally have buying resistance and have to be persuaded to purchase with effective selling offers. Selling is practiced mostly with unsought good where the consumers do not think of buying products immediately such as insurance policies and encyclopedias. Sellers make selling effort explaining benefits and offer attractive offers to make the buyers persuaded to purchase.

Selling is usually practiced at the firm who hold over capacity where they aim at sell whatever produced rather than producing what market needs. Selling holds a high risk as it assumes consumers will buy whatever that are produced when they are persuaded with attractive offers. And also it assumes that if consumers are not satisfied with the product they will not spread bad word of mouth and they will forget disappointment later and repurchase the product. But those assumptions fail as consumers spread bad word of mouth instantly if they are not satisfied. In other words bad news spread fast.

In contrast marketing concepts aims at identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer need with motive of achieving profit in a socially acceptable manner. Marketing is built around 4 main pillars of target market (Company should have a target market as they cannot cater to all), customer needs (company should identify unsatisfied needs of target market), coordinated marketing (firm should work with harmonization with other firms) and profitability (marketing should aim at earning profits to make the company survive in long run).

Difference between marketing and selling can be summarized as follows:

• Starting point of selling is the factory where they aim at producing what their production plant can produce. Starting point of marketing is market place where the organization looks into identifying needs of consumers.
• Focus of selling is to sell whatever that is produced in existing product range. Focus of marketing is to satisfy customer needs with new /existing products.
• Selling concept use attractive sales promotions and offers as the means of selling and marketing use integrated marketing (4 Ps [product, place, promotion and price]) as the means of achieving sales.
• Selling is a short term based exercise where marketing is aimed at long term.
• Selling ends by achieving profits through high sales volume and marketing ends at achieving high profits by satisfying customers.

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