Are consumer needs really fulfilled?

I know this post is coming after a long gap, almost a year now. In this post, I am discussing on consumer needs and seller’s response to it.

The priority of any business organization is to satisfy the needs of the consumer and here I mean the end user and not the one who spends the money on the product. And these needs vary from consumer to consumer. These needs may be both explicit and implicit. For example, a person comes to a restaurant and orders food. He/she orders ‘Idli-Sambar’- that’s his/her explicit need. His implicit needs include fresh idli, hot Sambar, the time duration in which it is served should be short, and the after taste should be good, etc.

Think of your past purchase and evaluate whether your both explicit and implicit needs were taken care of by the seller. Most of the times our explicit needs are fulfilled and our implicit needs are overlooked.

In the above example, since it belongs to the service industry; chances of your implicit needs getting fulfilled are more. The reason being the additional 3P’s of marketing that are active in case of service industry. To those, who don’t know about these 3P’s I am talking about People, Process and Physical evidence. These 3 P’s are observable then and there by consumers and therefore it becomes more mandatory for sellers to pay special attention to implicit needs of the consumer.

But when it comes to implicit needs in case of other industries especially FMCG market- how many times our implicit needs are fulfilled and we are satisfied with the product completely?