The Applicability of the Five Marketing Orientations to Avon Operations

The applicability of the five marketing orientations to Avon operations:

Production Orientation focuses on the efficiency and quality of production, with little emphasis on marketing. Avon’s core competency is providing low cost beauty care products to individual customers via direct sales. Their edge over other beauty care companies is the variety and quality of their products. Avon’s cost savings come from decreased infrastructure as they do not maintain many actual stores and the savings derived from not having to purchase shelf space for their products. Although according to the text Avon is attempting to cut down the number of products they provide an overall stream lining into a few main products to achieve production efficiency would counter man the success of Avon’s operation. Therefore a strictly production orientation marketing plan would not be a successful choice for Avon.

Sales Orientation focuses on selling the same product abroad as they sell domestically with the idea that if it sells here it will sell there. Due to the individual requirements for beauty care products one product will not sell effectively worldwide. For instance skin care products used in temperate climates will be less effective in humid or arid climates. Although some products will sell well internationally in order for Avon to stay competitive they cannot use a pure sales orientation.

Customer Orientation focuses on geographic areas or consumer bases for sales. When a market is identified the marketing and products do not change. With the diversity in consumers the customer orientation could be effective for Avon.

Strategic Orientation combines aspects of production, sales, and customer orientations. This is the orientation that A...

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...tion millions in revenue and can severly damage the reputation or shareholder value of an enterprise.

Works Cited

Avon, (2010). Earnings/ News Release. Retreived from http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=irol-newsArticle&ID=1214457.

Newsweek.com, (2011). Women: The Answer. Retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/2009/09/11/women-the-answer.html

Daniels, J. D., Radebaugh, L. H., and Sullivan, D. P., (2011). International Business: Environments and Operations. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.

Canedy, D., (1997). With Makeover a big Success, Avon Turns a lot of Heads. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/04/business/with-makeover-a-big-success-avon-turns-a-lot-of-heads.html.

The Manufacturer, (2010). Avon Products, A River Runs Through it. Retrieved from http://www.themanufacturer.com/us/profile/1657/Avon_Products