The Selling Concept
Selling concepts holds that consumers if left alone, will ordinarily not buy enough of the organization’s products. The organization must therefore undertake an aggressive selling and promotion.
The concept assumes that consumers typically show buying inertia or resistance, and have to be coaxed into buying, and that the company has available a whole battery of effective selling and promotion tools to stimulate more buying.
The selling concept is more practice most aggressively with “unsought goods,” those goods that buyers normally do not think of buying such as insurance, encyclopedia, and funeral plots.
These industries have perfected various sales techniques to locate prospects and hard sell them on the product benefits.
The selling concept is also practice in the non-profits area by fund raisers, college admission offices and political parties.
For examples, a political party may campaign aggressively to win an election.
Heavy advertising, numerous speeches and door to door visits may be used to promote its candidate while hiding their flaws.
After winning the party may take a sales oriented view by trying to get its citizens to accept its policies rather than to find out what voters really want.
Most firms practice the selling concept when they have overcapacity. Their aim is to sell what they make rather than make what the market wants.
In modern industrial economics, productive capacity has been built up to a point where most markets are buyer markets (that is buyers dominants) and sellers have to scramble hard for customers.
Prospects are bombarded with television commercials, news paper ads, direct mail and sales calls. At every turn, someone is trying to sell something. As a result, the public identifies marketing with hard selling and adverting.
The Selling Concept
