There are many different methods which organisations implement in order to run a business successfully. For example, in the early nineteen hundreds, businesses were mainly product orientated. This basically meant that organisations built a factory that made a product in large numbers. A well-known example is Henry Ford, who said,
             The customers can have any colour car they want as long as it is black.
             We can tell from his comment that he was uninterested in satisfying customer needs and wants. Instead, he just mass-produced a product expecting people to but it, and they did.
             This method of running a business would not be practical today however. This is because the majority of businesses have adopted the marketing concept, creating greater competition.
             The marketing concept is basically aimed at satisfying customer needs and wants. A brief definition of the marketing concept is as follows:
             ...an organisation should try to provide products that satisfy customer needs through a co-ordinated set of activities that also allows the organisation to achieve its goals. 1
             To implement the marketing concept successfully, an organisation must discover what type of product the potential customers want, and then develop and produce it. However, much more work is needed from the organisation. In order to keep up with the competition, it must continually adapt the product with the ever-changing wants and needs of the customer. This type of organisation could be described as customer orientated, and can be summarised in the flow chart on the last page.
             Since joining this company (Mephisto Products, Ltd.) I have evidently noticed that we are both production and sales orientated, and even though we produce high quality products our sales have been declining over the past three years. Most noticeably, over the past year our profits are down by fifteen percent and sales and turnover are static in a market, which was reckoned to be gr...