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In this episode of the Debullshified podcast we crack the bs around company orientation types, what they mean for the business, how you can expect leadership to act and what the role of marketing is.
If you’ve ever needed to understand a company beyond the mission, vision, values statement because they don’t tell you much, this is a superb way to “read” an organisation. Think of it like a very accurate personality test.
Here are the orientations we reviewed, and some basic info. For the full story, listen to the podcast.
Listen Wherever You Like
Production orientation type:
- Symptoms: Focused on manufacturing, creating, and in a never-ending search to increase volume and profits.
- The role of marketing: focused on optimising processes, working with partners, resellers, etc.
- What to expect: a constant creation and refreshment or processes and procedures, focus on innovation for the sake of cutting costs but for no other reason, employees are just a pawn, worships the engineering mindset.
Product orientation type:
- Symptoms: focused on developing cutting-edge products, most often approaches that don’t exist at all. Changes industries and often every-day life.
- The role of marketing: awareness generation and creation of cult-like following.
- What to expect: plenty of secrecy, lots of trials and errors, lots of research, worshiping of different thinking, leaks into everyone’s life until it becomes their life. And the customer is never right because he’s never introduced to the vision.
Market orientation type:
- Symptoms: satisfies obvious market needs, aims to make life easy for its customers, focuses on constant improvement.
- The role of marketing: work with NPS (Net Promoter Score) until it starts coming your nose, focus on data, serve customers best at all times.
- What to expect: the end-customer is always right, and the focus is on them even when it harms the company and potentially partners. Very data driven and everything must be supported by statistics. Huge success usually and often a lot of growth, but plenty of competition.
Sales orientation type:
- Symptoms: focused on selling what already exists. It’s all about profits, profits, profits.
- The role of marketing: to support the stars of the business, a.k.a. sales people.
- What to expect: absolute constant focus on ROI. Commonly a rapid growth that has no sustainability. Fast-moving, 0 values outside of profit and growth, difficult, often toxic environment but the opportunity to earn a lot if you join the sales team.
Societal orientation type:
- Symptoms: focused on making the world a better place through a service or a product that’s more sustainable that alternatives.
- The role of marketing: to convince people that its worth paying more or something towards a higher purpose.
- What to expect: values to be at the core of the company but internal stability doesn’t seem given. Often, leadership struggles to maintain the values when facing financial struggles.
