Zara Case Study: Customer-Oriented Marketing

Marketing entails a strategic idea of connectedness with customers. As a customer-oriented philosophy, marketing prioritizes achievement of an organization's goals through the satisfaction of clients' needs and wants. Such a development leads to the acquisition of competitive advantage as the company directs its efforts to identify and meet customer needs and expectations better than the competitors do (Finch, 2012). Finch's definition highlights an organization's connectedness to its customers. Such is the case, as a company will make strategic decisions that reflect consideration of customers' needs through creating products that satisfy those needs.

Zara operates under Inditex. Similar to other companies, Inditex connects with both the existing and potential clients to ensure high movement of its inventory. In a typical business, the selling and marketing concepts define an organization's connectedness with its customers. The selling concept holds that customers will not purchase enough of a company's products when given an opportunity to interact with a company freely. As such, an organization has to indulge and invest in aggressive sales promotion efforts to coax customers into purchasing its products (Northern Arizona University, n.d.).