The Profitability of Marketing Operations

In a developing country maximization of profit and economic growth in any business is generally more certain when the market is diversified than it is concentrated. However, diversification does not exclude the other.
Where there is scarcity of an essential commodity where there is much demand for it in common such as wheat or teff, mass production or economies of scale may cause the expensive price to drop and at the same time to create a better margin for profit.
In such a case, where most people want to by wheat or teff no amount of ad or publicity tends to increase the purchasing tempo of the people, neither is it necessary to bother much about it. Undifferentiated marketing usually do not require much dexterity.
The problem lies as it concerns differentiated and concentrated marketing. What characterizes the developing countries is more of the undiffentiated marketing where it is pronounced more in the characteristics of their informal market sectors. In such a case everybody requires onion, pepper, butter, teff or wheat in its raw form. Here, the maximum such a market may require is a mass advertisement as all run to the market to buy the common item.
Market strategy becomes more cautious when it comes to differentiated and concentrated marketing. These two elements of marketing options depend upon a careful study of population proliferation or demographic segmentation.
When a developing country’s market designs different products aimed for different market targets and when the same market wants to take over a large share of a small market segment including the niche-market, then the problem of its capacity to handle the operation successfully and to maximize profit becomes exposed to question.
This is exactly where the developing countries’ markets should become very careful. Particularly, where specific statistical data are lacking in the distribution pattern of the people according to age, sex, educational level and particularly according to their income bracket; in other words, where the demographic segmentation is highly controversial marketing strategy should be more careful in its design. Generally speaking, meaningful conclusion about marketing organization becomes doubtful in such a case, let alone thinking about the profitability of its operation. This is also true in all segments of the economy, be it the financial, industrial, and the service giving institutions.
Fortunately, some countries such as Ethiopia are gradually coming out of such a dilemma and today they are on a clear stage whether or not to adopt undifferentiated, differentiated, or a concentrated marketing strategy.
Nonetheless, every marketing institution in the developing world should be very careful in designing its marketing strategy which may have a net impact on its organization; whether the design and production of a certain commodity is based on purpose or personality, or on consideration of small or high price marking.
It is the sophistication of the differentiated or concentrated market that would determine the level of the profitability of marketing operation. And it is this element that call for experienced marketing and business development experts. The time is now ripe for some organizations to think more concretely than any single moment in the past to make a cursory reference to the past, a true analysis of the present and a realistic prognostication in the future of their particular marketing situation to modernize it with new imputes when necessary and maintain sustainable profitability level all the time rationally.