What is the Selling Concept?
The selling concept assumes that the customers will either buy or not buy enough of the firm’s products unless the firm makes a substantial effort to stimulate their interests in its products.
Primarily this marketing concept focuses on how a firm promotes and sells its products. As per this concept, people will buy more products and services if means of aggressive selling are adopted.
There is no consideration for customer satisfaction and repeated buying in the selling concept. It assumes that even if people do not like the products, the disappointment would be forgotten in the long run. The best example of this concept is political campaigns.
The basic features of the marketing concept are:
- Persuasive selling-high faith in powerful salesmanship and sales promotion.
- Transaction marketing-Focus on one-time sales.
- No consideration for customer satisfaction and repeat buying-Useful in political marketing and marketing of unsought products
- Key role in organization-sales manager.
Now, let’s see how these features relate.
The selling concept evolved out of the failure of production and product concepts of marketing in a dynamic and competitive market. Organizations that produced large quantities of standardized low price merchandise could not sell their products through low price and the quality emphasis they adopted the selling concept. This concept gave birth to various promoting tools such as advertising, campaigns, and so on.
The organizations believe that there is a large number of customers and there is a whole range of selling techniques available to attract customers at least once. Even if one selling method fails, it can lure buyers through other methods.
The organization puts heavy emphasis on convincing and persuading the buyers about super quality and fair prices of goods and services. It also believes that customers ordinarily forget their dissatisfaction. Even if some of the customers are dissatisfied, there are many others who can be lured to buy the organization’s products through sales promotions. Sales managers who can organize aggressive selling play key roles in the sales of the organization.
The selling marketing concept has been successful in the field of political marketing, where a political party sells its candidate through heavy promotions. The voters are tempted by high soulful promises. The selling concept is also useful for selling unsought products that buyers normally do not think of buying. Examples of unsought products are life insurance, subscription in magazines, luxury cars, high-quality fashion clothing. The insurance salesperson that untiringly visits a prospect’s selling times and convinces the prospect of the benefits of buying a life insurance policy is practiced in the selling concept.
This concept is successfully implemented in political marketing and marketing of unsought products. This idea works in political marketing because the time lag for another voting decision (election) is four to five years away. It works for unsought products because they are bought once during the entire lifetime of a buyer.
Today many business organizations strongly believe in the selling concept of marketing. They believed that selling can be achieved only when some promotion schemes are introduced with the product. Many organizations introduce sales promotions from the first day of the product launch.
The basic problem with the selling concept is its assumption that a majority of the buyers can have been lured to buy the product would ultimately like the product. Those who do not like the product would forget their disappointment with the product.
For many other products repeat purchases and satisfied buyers are highly essential for success. Dissatisfied buyers relate their disappointment to other people. The word of mouth travels very fast and the organization loses both its buyers and goodwill quickly. In absence of repeat buyers, the organization is forced to close down its business.