Delivering Customer Value Through Marketing.
The concept of value and, more specifically, customer value is of increasing interest to both academics and practitioners. Driven by more demanding customers, global competition, and adverse economic conditions, organisations must search for new ways to achieve and retain a competitive advantage. Previously, efforts have focused internally within the organisation for improvement, such as reflected by quality management, reengineering, downsizing, and restructuring. However, a major source for competitive advantage can emerge from concentrating efforts on an outward orientation toward customers. There are numerous success stories of businesses that have overcome difficult trading environments and have competed effectively by developing/communicating strong brands and offering superior customer value. These examples of best practice can offer guidelines for the effective management of organizations in the next decade and beyond, across a range of industries. Indeed it has been suggested that managers should seek sources of best practice from outside of their own industries, in order to develop and implement innovations. This assignment addresses this issue and focuses on the development ofeffective branding and communications, customer value, and the related skills that managers need to create and implement superior customer value driven strategies.
There is a considerable raft of literature to support research in this area. The following two extracted quotes from Journal of Retailing and Consumer Servicesare provided for illustration and demonstrate the importance of considering customer service/value (particularly when incorporating the internet within business models):
“Value-enhancing services may be offered in any phase of customers’ buying processes. A growing body of literature documents the importance of the Internet in shoppers’ pre-purchase search for sources and evaluation of alternatives, acquisition process, and post-purchase support (Carlson, 2000; Kolesar and Galbraith, 2000; Kiff, 2000; Betts, 2001; Devlin, 2001; Burke, 2002; Zeithaml, 2002; Chen and Dubinsky, 2003). “If an organization has a presence on the Internet and is selling products or supplying information, customers expect to get service through the same channel” (Carlson, 2000, p. 28).Unfortunately, despite the Internet’s prevalence, growth, and prolific use for marketing purposes, there are reports that e-service is “generally poor” (Griffith and Krampf, 1998; Kolesar and Galbraith, 2000; Burke, 2002; Darian et al., 2001; Zeithaml, 2002). Kolesar and Galbraith (2000) suggest that this is due to the nature of the medium, since the Internet lacks the capacity for direct personal interaction in the same sense as in the physical world and requires customers to forego benefits that are commonly associated with in-store shopping (e.g., immediate acquisition). Perceptions of inadequate service may also be due to poorly designed Web sites (Passikoff, 2000; Burke, 2002; Chen and Dubinsky, 2003), the heterogeneous (and frequently fickle) nature of consumers (Kolesar and Galbraith, 2000), or breakdowns in the performance of e-retailing processes (Kolesar and Galbraith, 2000).”
“One approach that may be helpful in understanding how strategies may be more successfully employed to enhance customer value, is benchmarking. Benchmarking, the process of comparing one’s practices and procedures against those believed to be the best in an industry, is fitting for several reasons. While early benchmarking efforts focused on manufacturing and logistics, the process has grown to encompass a wider array of activities including exporting (Crespy et al., 1993), quality goals in service systems (Chen, 1998), supply chain interface (Bommer et al., 2001; Simpson and Kondouli, 2000), employee practices (Simpson and Kondouli, 2000), and brand management (Andriopoulos and Gotsi, 2000), to name a few. At the same time, the focus has shifted from an emphasis on comparison with direct competitors to learning about best practices and identifying possibilities (Smith, 2000).
Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services: Volume 12, Issue 5, September 2005, Pages 319–331; Delivering customer value online: an analysis of practices, applications, and performance
Task:
You are to prepare a paper, written in academic style of around 6000 words which focuses on the area of developing best practice in customer value. The paper should review key literature in the area and should also incorporate a case study of an organisation of your choice which you feel offers superior value from a benchmarking perspective. The organisation may be from any business sector/size. You should focus on its effectiveness in areas such as marketing communications; customer service; positive stakeholder relationship marketing; branding; innovative approaches to marketing and product/brand development.
PLACE THIS ORDER OR A SIMILAR ORDER WITH US TODAY AND GET AN AMAZING DISCOUNT 🙂