Free «Modern Companies» Essay Sample

Modern companies can choose from a variety of business strategies nowadays. However, the main dilemma for the companies is weather focus on products is more efficient than orientation on customers. A lot of large companies, such as IBM (Herrington, 2008), have recently changed their business strategies to customer orientation. Nevertheless, there is not a single perfect solution for every company. Thus, the aim of this paper is to analyze implementation of which strategy is more beneficial and efficient for business practice.

Business strategy of customer focusing benefits in creating innovative products, which are believed to meet the market demand (Leto, 2011). However, without maximizing the customers’ profit and revenue, increasing the amount of customers and company’s efficiency, brought by product focusing approach, the business strategy is quite limited and will not be highly efficient (Herrington, 2008). Both strategies have some disadvantages. For instance, implementing a customer oriented strategy might require additional efforts and finance for supporting customers and learning a market (Herrington, 2008). The disadvantage of product focusing is the increase of innovation costs and the high possibility of not meeting the customers’ expectations (Leto, 2011).

Although the strategies are referred to as two controversial approaches, they intermingle (Leto, 2011). Product orientation assumes that customers’ needs were taken into account because they were the reason for creating a product. Hence, there is not a certain separation between the two approaches (Kalehoff, 2008).

Therefore, I believe that using a business strategy in its pure configuration, with either customer or product orientation, cannot be considered as the most efficient way of business. The key to increasing profitability and success of the company is in combining the two approaches, which complement each other. Even the best products cannot be sold in the market without customers. In the same way, meeting customers’ needs and keeping them happy is not possible without offering decent products.