The use of the marketing concept as guiding philosophy for an organisation.

Marketing has become more important for the organization management in recent decades. Most successful companies carry out marketing-oriented strategy such as Coca-cola, Dell and P&G. With the development of the globalization, marketing is not an unfamiliar term to many Chinese companies. Shanghai GM, the largest joint-venture company in china, adopts the marketing concept as guiding philosophy to cope with the knee competition.

Shanghai GM, established in 1997, not only introduces the advanced product, manufacture technology and equipment, but also the modern management concept. It aims to own the largest market share in the car market. In order to achieve this objective, Shanghai GM develops marketing management to realize its strategic goals. 'Marketing management is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, good, services to create exchanges that satisfy individual and organizational goals.' (Kotler, 2000) The marketing concept indicates that focusing and satisfying the customer is the vital factor to achieving organizational goals.

Shanghai GM built Buick New Century, facelift vers...

Buick New Century, built by Shanghai GM in China

Chevrolet Sail (facelifted Buick Sail, aka Opel Co...

Therefore Shanghai GM's managerial principle is customer satisfaction, which shows in following aspects: target market and segmentation; relationship and networks; marketing channels; competition; and product.

To begin with, the marketing concept leads to the consideration of market segmentation and targeting. 'not everyone will have the same needs to the fore at the same point in time.'(Evans, Moutinho, Raaij,1996) Shanghai GM realizes that it must identify different needs and wants of customers in order to satisfy them. Shanghai GM's products are focused on organization buyers in the past few years because of the low purchase power of Chinese people. However the situation changes very fast, with the development of China's economy, Chinese people's living standard has been improved rapidly. Some Chinese want to own a car of reasonable price. The people are mainly small business owners, professors in...