Customer-Centric Strategies for Business Success
Focus on the Customer
The Customer Comes First
Excellent companies exhibit:
- A bias for action, rather than just planning or waiting for something to happen.
- Keeping close to the customer by learning from them.
- Encouraging the development of leaders and innovators by supporting creativity and risk-taking.
- Focusing on core competencies.
- Practicing a value-driven approach, by concentrating on achievements rather than technological or economic resources or organizational structure.
- Recognizing the main productivity gains could be achieved by employees rather than through capital investment.
Manager 2000 Plus
- “Manager 2000 will practice cooperation and collaboration with everybody, inside and outside the firm, from colleagues and subordinates to customers and suppliers.”
- Managers deal with “self-managed teams”; it is less about empowerment and more about enablement.
- Organizations are judged on their outcomes. They depend on looking at customer requirements with fresh eyes and reshaping the organization to meet their needs.
New Forms of Organization
The Federal Organization
A variety of individual organizations or groups of organizations allied together by a common approach and mutual interest. It provides a way for relatively small companies based on core workers to obtain advantages of large companies. It allows individuals to work in organization villages with the advantage of big city facilities.
The Triple I Organization
- A mix of both the shamrock organization and the federation.
- Intelligence, Information, and Ideas, which form the Intellectual capital represented by core workers.
- Learning organizations serving their customers as a result of their employees remaining at the leading edge of knowledge and skills.
Marketing Orientation
Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating, and satisfying customer requirements profitably.
Consumption is the role and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.
The Marketing Process
Comprises:
- Finding out what the customer wants.
- Developing products/services to satisfy those wants.
- Establishing a price consistent with the requirements of the supplier and the perceptions of the customer.
- Distributing products/services to the customer.
- Agreeing on the exchange, selling.
Market Research
Market research is the planned, systematic collection, collation, and analysis of data designed to help the management of an organization to reach decisions about its operation and to monitor the results of these decisions. Marketing research is concerned with the marketing process while Market research is concerned with the measurement and analysis of markets.
Managers are interested in:
- The size of the market for a product or service.
- The pattern of demand (economic, social, political, and technical factors that might influence future demand).
- Market structure (size and number of companies, income groups, sex and age distribution, geography).
- Buying habits of people.
- Market share of the company.
- Past and future trends in areas.
- Overseas markets that may present opportunities.
The Research process:
Definition of the problem, Information required, Objectives, Research plan and methods, Sources of information, Sample surveys, Results, Analysis and interpretation, Presentation, Monitoring, and evaluation.
The Marketing Process
It starts with a marketing audit (a formal review of elements affecting the organizational marketing environment). We use STEP (Social, Technological, Economic, Political) or PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental). The marketing environment can be categorized as SPECTACLES (Social, Political, Economic, Technological, Aesthetic, Customers, Legal, Environmental, Sectoral).
Marketing Mix
4Ps that constitute the marketing mix:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
The process of achieving this optimum marketing mix can be summarized as APPEAL:
- Assess the needs of consumers.
- Produce the right commodity or service.
- Price the commodity or service successfully.
- Ensure a high-quality product or service.
- Advertise and promote the product/service effectively.
- Launch an efficient distribution system.
Product and Services
A product is anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, use, or consumption that might satisfy a want or need. It includes physical objects, services, persons, places, organizations, and ideas.
Basic Questions About the Market
The 6 Os:
- Occupants: Which individuals constitute the market?
- Object: What do consumers wish to buy?
- Occasions: When do customers make purchases?
- Organizations: Who is involved in the decision to purchase?
- Objectives: Why do consumers buy particular commodities?
- Operations: How do consumers buy products and services?
Customer retention is the number of customers present at the beginning of a period who remain as customers at the end of the period, divided by the number of those present at the beginning. Long-term relationships with customers are more profitable because:
- The cost of acquiring new customers can be substantial.
- Loyal customers tend to spend more.
- Regular customers tend to place frequent, consistent orders, therefore usually cost less to serve.
- Satisfied customers are the best advertisement for any business and are likely to introduce new customers to the company through word-of-mouth recommendations.
- Retaining customers makes gaining market entry or share gain difficult for competitors.
- The information collated and held on loyal customers through database management allows the company to communicate regularly with them.
Life-Cycle Analysis
(A pattern that includes four or five identifiable stages)
- Introduction: A period of slow growth as the product/service is introduced.
- Growth: A period of rapid market acceptance.
- Maturity: A period of slower growth because the product or service has been accepted by most of the potential buyers.
- Saturation: There are many competitors in the market, no longer growing.
- Decline: Performance starts a strong downward drift.