Public Sector & Market Orientations

This assignment requires you to select a public-sector organization in Canada and analyze its approach to marketing using Kumar's framework (sales-driven, market-driven, customer-driven, or market-driving). You'll explain your chosen orientation and contrast it with the market-driving approach exemplified by companies like Apple. The assignment also delves into the differences between market-driven and market-driving strategies, using examples like Microsoft and Sony to illustrate their respective approaches.

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1. Find a public-sector organization of Canada and relate it with any one of the
following from Kumar’s framework sales-driven, market-driven, customer-driven
or market-driving. Explain why.
In this era of high competition, managers of public sector organizations require to have a
clear understanding of consumer needs and desire in order to gain competitive advantage in the
market. Besides that, in order to cope up with the competition in the international market, the
private sector companies must focus on their innovation skills to create unique products that an
effectively attract consumers and thus create a trend. Considering the fact that market driving
approach involves innovations for long term goals and success of the company, it can be
considered to be more effective for gaining brand equity in today’s highly competitive market
than the other mentioned orientations. In today’s fast changing market, companies need to look
behind factors like consumer satisfaction and instead concentrate on shaping new desires of the
consumers (Kumar, 2004). Several public sector organizations like Sony are ignoring the
traditional trends and are concentrating on developing new trends which in turn is improving
their consumer value proposition and enhancing the brand equity of the organizations.
The primary goal of the Sony Company is not only to satisfy its consumers but also to
motivate them. The chief objective of the company is to bring about brand new innovation in the
world of environment that will make the brand unique from its competitors (Sony, 2018). The
company has immense enthusiasm for innovation, services and products along with persistent
quest for advancement. Instead of following the trends, Sony concentrates on creating new and
innovative entertainment products that create new desires in the consumers. Some of the most
unique products of Sony that have been ruling the global market and have successfully shaped
the desires of Canadian consumers are the transistor radio, Walk-man, 3.5-inch diskette, and

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audio compact disk. The controlling doctrine of Sony is ‘New items generates new markets’.
According to Sony, their products are the representative of the dream of the company to make
the market more energized and innovation loving.
1. What are the differences between market-driven and market-driving?
It is a crucial step for the management of an organization to decide whether to choose the
market driven strategy or the market driving strategy for long term success of the organization.
While market driving organization focuses on enhancing the consumer loyalty by constantly
surprising by with unique values, brand new services and products, market driven organizations
are guided by the contemporary market trends and requirements instead on focusing on the
Company’s capacity, productivity or current products. While market driving companies take
risks and create trends, market driven companies follow the trend created by the former (Chen,
Li & Evans, 2012). For instance, Apple Co. follows market driving strategy which involves
taking risks to constantly amaze the consumers with innovative and unique products and
services. On the other hand, Microsoft can be considered as a market driven Organization as the
company is failing to take risks and as a result is reacting after a major market shift have already
occurred. As a result, iTune has gained a lot more popularity than Zune and consumers are more
inclined to go for an iPhone rather than buying a windows mobile. Thus it can be said that the
market driving approach is much more cost effective than the market driving approach.
The approach taken by the two above mentioned strategy are completely different. The
strategy of market driven organization includes conduction of excessive research in order to
understand the existing consumer’s requirements. The organizations following market driven
approach, conduct multiple validation cycles with vast requirements documented and detailed

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written benefits and specifications of features. After the conduction of detailed research, another
laborious process is followed by the companies which involves multiple cycle of developing and
test strategy in order to develop differentiated services or products (Elg et al., 2012). While this
approach can still be considered effective for stack and well defined market segments, for other
market segments the market driven approach is totally obsolete.
In market driving approach, the companies focus on long term success unhampered by the
current market trends, industry norms and traditional thinking for development of product. The
companies following market driving strategies focus on innovations and make discontinuous
leaps in innovation in terms of consumer value. The mission of these organizations is to build
unique value networks that will enable them to get engaged in a larger business ecosystem with
the help of business model innovation and technologies.

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Reference list
Chen, Y. C., Li, P. C., & Evans, K. R. (2012). Effects of interaction and entrepreneurial
orientation on organizational performance: Insights into market driven and market
driving. Industrial Marketing Management, 41(6), 1019-1034, retrieved from:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019850112000363
Elg, U., Deligonul, S. Z., Ghauri, P. N., Danis, W., & Tarnovskaya, V. (2012). Market-driving
strategy implementation through global supplier relationships. Industrial Marketing
Management, 41(6), 919-928, Retrieved from:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/39938172/Market-
driving_strategy_implementation_t20151112-21623-1lymtmw.pdf?
AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1519215799&Signature=
Xrev6DBcTdRKyJ%2Fbzbd8LN%2FFJo0%3D&response-content-disposition=inline
%3B%20filename%3DMarket-driving_strategy_implementation_t.pdf
Kumar, N. (2004). Marketing as Strategy: Understanding the CEO's Agenda for driving Growth
and Innovation. Harvard Business Review Press, retrieved from:
https://books.google.co.in/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=JprBAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR1&dq=Kumar,+N.+(2004).
+Marketing+as+strategy.+Boston,+MA:
+Harvard+Business+School+Press.&ots=nBRYTnM_sc&sig=ebC-
HvmgJ0pFUKkUYzGMPc2PaQc#v=onepage&q&f=false
Sony. (2018). About Sony . Retrieved from Sony, retrieved from:
https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/

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