Posted on : 2023-04-02 20:19:01
Article : Good morning, Monday management solution for the TASK 235- Drucker identified only two basic functions of any business in order to be successful. These two essential functions are marketing and innovation. (Read this part twice to further understand the essence of this topic)
Surprisingly, Drucker identified only two basic functions of any business in order to be successful. These may surprise you. The two essential functions are marketing and innovation. You may think that Drucker was talking about selling and a sales job. In fact, he noted not only that marketing and selling were not the same, but that the two might not even be complementary.
For example, if marketing were done correctly and without error, selling would be unnecessary since the prospect would inherently recognize that the product or service you offered satisfied an important need which exactly fit his values and goals, and the results he wanted to achieve. Of course, no marketing is done perfectly, so selling would always be necessary. But this demonstrates that Drucker was referring to marketing as strategy, and sales as a part of tactics supporting the strategy selected. Further he wrote that, marketing begins with the question, "What does the other party want?" Then we need to know "What does it value?" "What are its goals?" "What does it consider results?" Marketing not only determines who the other party is, it may also determine which other party we plan to target. So marketing is the strategy. Tactically marketing is described by the "marketing mix" of four "p’s." These are, product, price, promotion and place (distribution). Promotion is further categorized into subsets, one of which is personal selling. This means that selling is part of marketing, and supportive of it.
The general assumption is, the better the sales job, the better the overall marketing (strategy) effort and that there is an automatic connection. Once a Harvard professor wrote that good tactics in marketing can overcome a poor strategy. Drucker disagreed. With selling, he claimed that not only might it not be congruent or complementary to marketing, but that selling and marketing could very well be adversarial. For example, successful selling of the wrong product, or to the wrong market, would result in misallocation of scarce company resources, even if successful.
If any enterprise has only these two basic functions, we would expect to see this as a part of virtually any human endeavour where the purpose was to create a customer. For example, a training organization realizes that it has an important customer who is not the trainee. This customer is the combat organization that acquires these trained soldiers after their completion of basic training. Basic trainees are expected to possess essential military skills such as being able to operate as a small unit team, rifle marksmanship, and field skills such that they can be integrated into a combat-ready organization as fully functioning members.
This training is price and time sensitive, and the level of service provided represents a cost which must be carefully considered. While the training organization may not be able to choose its target customer as part of its overall strategy, it is expected to innovate, make changes in training and do everything else it can to provide the most highly trained and capable soldiers possible within the restrictions of time and budget. In short, its success is based on marketing and innovation.
If success rests on only two functions: marketing and innovation, you face a number of problems. Economic conditions are such that budgets are severely restricted. This affects the numbers of individuals that can be hired by your "customers," compensation levels that can be paid, level of experience of new hires, money that can be allocated for advertising openings, and a lot more.
Now let’s look first at Drucker’s recommendation to start with the question, "What does the other party want?" Obviously in this instance the customer wants qualified people, but there is a lot more. What does the customer value? Different departments value different aspects of gaining qualified employees. One department may value the absolutely best people it can obtain. Another department may value speed of recruitment above all else. When it needs people, it needs them NOW and doesn’t want a lot of time spent on trying to recruit the optimum candidate.
A good marketing job means understanding the department’s goals both near and long term and what it would consider good results. For the customer focused on speed, you may recruit the top three candidates in the country for the position in the thought that after interviewing all three your customer can pick the perfect employee. If the customer needs an immediate hire he may want you to send the first candidate in today and forget giving him multiple choices.
Ongoing economic and business conditions in your industry always mean additional tactical problems. If you no longer have the budget for extensive media advertising, you might need to use innovation and develop new methods of candidate acquisition or screening. Of course, this is only one example of one job, in one type of department.
End point- In all cases you must adapt the concept of the true purpose of business and the two essential functions of marketing and innovation to your responsibility. Do it, and be ready to be amazed at the results.
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