Marketing Orientation And Its Consequence For The Food Chain

Agri – food markets have been undergoing a dramatic change. The former primarily seller dominated markets have been transformed to buyer-dominated markets. Buyer orientation results in a marketing orientation philosophy. Therefore organisations must have proper knowledge of their target markets, their customer focus groups and the driving forces of their business.The underlying concept is the marketing orientation as a core competence of a successful network. The authors predict that the present competition of a single enterprise will be substituted in the future by a competition of vertical co-operating “Supply Chain Networks” steered through co-operating management systems like ECR and CPFR being customer orientated.In the paper the following questions must be answered:Does marketing orientation change the quality understanding in business and production processes?Does a more precise customer segmentation change the handling of commodities within the network?In terms of networks, which incentives will be used to guarantee the customer orientation of the whole chain?To answer these questions, chain systems must be analysed in terms of which quality attributes are perceived as important by the consumer and how can they be transmitted into the system.