The customers can have any colour car they want as long as it is black.

We can tell from his comment that he was uninterested in satisfying customer needs and wants. Instead, he just mass-produced a product expecting people to but it, and they did.

This method of running a business would not be practical today however. This is because the majority of businesses have adopted the marketing concept, creating greater competition.

The marketing concept is basically aimed at satisfying customer needs and wants. A brief definition of the marketing concept is as follows:

...an organisation should try to provide products that satisfy customer needs through a co-ordinated set of activities that also allows the organisation to achieve its goals. 1

To implement the marketing concept successfully, an organisation must discover what type of product the potential customers want, and then develop and produce

The micro environment is the internal environment or forces we can control.

Since joining this company (Mephisto Products, Ltd.) I have evidently noticed that we are both production and sales orientated, and even though we produce high quality products our sales have been declining over the past three years. Most noticeably, over the past year our profits are down by fifteen percent and sales and turnover are static in a market, which was reckoned to be growing at a rate of some twenty percent per annum. If we continue to decline in this way we will be out of business in a year. I see this as unacceptable and in order to remedy this situation I suggest that we develop our present strategy and take a more customer orientated approach. To do this successfully we must understand the micro and macro environment and adapt our company accordingly.

The macro environment is the external environment, or forces we are unable to control, and they can be grouped into four categories.

it. However, much more work is needed from the organisation. In order to keep up with the competition, it must continually adapt the product with the ever-changing wants and needs of the customer. This type of organisation could be described as customer orientated, and can be summarised in the flow chart on the last page.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Products Ltd, Henry Ford, , marketing concept, macro environment, customer orientated, implementing marketing concept, satisfied staff satisfied, implement marketing concept, definition marketing concept, implementing marketing, satisfying customer, micro environment, staff satisfied, implement marketing, information system, definition marketing,
Approximate Word count = 890
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)