What Is Demarketing?

Demarketing is a little known concept which aims at dissuading customers from consuming or buying some things either because it is harmful or simply because the demand is more than the supply. This could be on a temporary or permanent basis.

There could be general demarketing where the company plans to reduce the total supply. The company may have production problems and hence is facing temporary shortages, or chronic over popularity where it cannot meet the demands or it may want to eliminate a product. In selective demarketing the company plans to discourage specific groups of customers and in ostensible demarketing demand is discouraged to increase situation.

There are various demarketing strategies which can be implemented depending on the situation. Firstly keep close attention to the time requirements of various customers. Secondly, the product could be rationed by differentiating consumers on an equitable basis. Thirdly encouraging clients to use substitutes temporarily or allowing them to use products already purchased by another client. All this helps to maintain customer good will even when the customer's demands do not match the supply from the company. From the company's point of view, the role of demarketing is to make sure that the demand is at the same stage and composition which favours the long term goals of the company.

To conclude demarketing is marketing in the opposite direction so that product, price and company policies deflate demand and limits growth.

De -marketing is a concept which means to discourage the use of some product or good in the times of shortages. It is usually practiced by governments when shortage for any good or service arise in short term. Businesses also tend to de-market their products in order to coup with the shortages created in short run.

There can different reasons for the creation of shortage. It can be the fact that the manufacturers of goods do not have enough resources to produce the goods hence in this case demand becomes greater than the supply. When this situation arise where demand exceeds available supply, prices tend to increase because more and more people will want to buy the product which is already less than its demand.

Supply Demand gap can be created due to many reasons. One of the important reason may be non-availability of raw materials to produce it. If raw materials are present, there may be scarcity of qualified human resource which can produce the good so there are different factors because of which demarketing is done deliberately by the companies.

Governments do it in order to discourage the price to raise beyond controllable levels or if there are more serious social repercussions of the use of that good.