The market is made up of consumers and clients, and it is around the consumer that all business activity must revolve.
The success of a company depends fundamentally on the demand of its customers. They are the main protagonists and the most important factor that make a company prosper or fail.
Market definition
In general, when we hear the word “market” we associate it with a physical place where similar products are sold: vegetables, fish and shellfish, groceries, car parts, etc.
From the economic point of view, the market is defined as the meeting between the forces of supply (producers or suppliers) and demand ( clients or consumers ) to carry out transactions of goods and services at a certain price.
So a market has suppliers, which are the companies or people that have a product or service that can satisfy the needs of the applicants.
If you have a business, that is, you offer a product and/or a service, you are a “supplier”.
For their part, the applicants (clients or consumers) are the people, households, companies and institutions that have needs to satisfy, want to do so and have the economic means to satisfy those needs with the products of the suppliers.
The plaintiffs may be physically close and they go to the business, for example, the buyers of vegetables at the fair, the neighbors of the store or warehouse, the customers of a hairdresser, etc.
In other cases, they may be far away and you have to go out looking for them, for example, selling cosmetics at home, delivering food to an office, etc.
Each supplier sells a percentage of the total product offered in a market. Thus, for example, in a monopoly market, that is, where there is only one supplier, he has 100% of the market share.
In competitive markets, sales are distributed among several suppliers, what each one sells is what is called its “market share” (its piece of the pie).
Characteristics of customers and consumers
The customers and consumers of a company can be people or other companies or businesses.
Customers buy the products and consumers use/consume them.
Sometimes the customer and the consumer are the same person, for example, when a person buys a car to use himself.
On other occasions, the client and the consumer are two different people.
For example, when the client buys the clothes we make in our business and then sells them to the public in his store, he is only a client, not a consumer. The consumer is the person who buys our clothes to wear them.
In the classical theory of microeconomics, it is understood that a consumer has a budget, which can be spent on any product or service available in the market.
Since people are supposed to be rational, that is, intelligent, this choice will be made according to consumer preferences.
Consumer preferences are strongly influenced by price, as well as other product characteristics and their previous shopping experiences.
For any business, customers must come first, they are its reason for being.
They are the ones who generate the profits, therefore, we must worry about delivering a good product or service so that they return in the future, in other words, captivate them to achieve their loyalty.
You always have to think about the customer in the long term. If we try to take advantage of the customer, with a very high price, or by selling him something defective, we may win once, but that customer will not come back.
The shopping experience is the key moment in which we can influence the client so that he returns, he must feel that acquiring the product or service was a good decision.
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