Chapter 8: Marketing for Scientists

Making advances in science and technology is great; however, even the best scientists need to understand marketing to ensure successful adoption of their scientific ideas into products or services. This is where marketing (and not merely advertising) comes in. This chapter introduces key concepts of marketing for non-marketers. Understanding of these concepts will help the managers in harnessing the power of marketing to augment the firm’s sales and profit. Some of the key concepts covered in this chapter include: (a) environmental analysis and SWOT; (b) consumer behaviour; (c) marketing research; (d) marketing strategy and (e) marketing mix.

A key concept which is closely associated with marketing is ‘market orientation’ (Kohli & Jaworski, 1990). Market orientation encompasses three key components: (1) customer orientation; (2) competitor orientation and (3) inter-functional coordination and two additional decision criteria: (a) long-term focus and (b) profitability (Narver & Slater, 1990). Customer orientation refers to a firm’s adequate understanding of one’s customers to be able to create superior value for them; whereas competitor orientation requires that the firm understands the short-term strengths and weaknesses and long-term capabilities and strategies of both the current and potential competitors (Narver & Slater, 1990). The final component is inter-functional coordination which requires coordinated utilisation of the firm’s resources in creating superior value for customers, resulting in profits (Narver & Slater, 1990). Indeed, market orientation is found to have a significant positive impact on the overall business performance of an organization in both the short and long term (Kumar, Jones, Venkatesan, & Leone, 2011). Another important take away is that firm’s that are early to develop market orientation are more successful in augmenting their sales and profits than firms that are late in developing market orientation (Kumar et al., 2011). Interestingly, market orientation tends to have a greater effect on the firm’s bottom line (i.e. profits) than top line (i.e. sales) because market orientation focusses efforts more on customer retention than on customer acquisition (Kumar et al., 2011).