Relationship Marketing: A Source of competitive Advantages By Dr. N. K. Sehgal (Indian Journal of Marketing, march 2007)
According to him with the advent of relationship marketing, companies are prepared to do anything to keep their customers happy and satisfied. A satisfied customer is not going to shift his loyalty to the competition’s grab for additional sales. Business firms are now willingly engaged in constant improvisation, personalization and customization, marking a visible shift from “marketing myopia” to “marketing hypermetropia”. The reason of all this is pretty simple. “If you would not take care of your customers, your competitors definitely would.” So the firms should keep pleasing customers and they will keep coming back. Deliver what you promise-on time and in a visible fashion. A satisfied customer is the best advertising a firm can do. So, in present times, to be successful a company needs to be not just High Tech but High Touch as well. Future of a business can be very bright if it nurtures the key relationships well.
Sustainable Marketing: Challenges and Opportunities By Rajeev Kumar Panda (Indian Journal of Marketing, Dec 2007)
According to him most marketing academies practitioners view marketing and consumer behavior from the perspective of what happens before the product is consumed. The emphasis is on attracting customers to products, pricing them appropriately having them available when and where they are demanded and promoting the products/services. In contrast, environmentalists focus almost exclusively on consumption and post-consumption rather than what goes on beforehand. Sustainable marketing requires that we spend an equal, if not greater, amount of time and energy on what happens after the individual or business “consumes” the product. Designing products in more of a modular fashion to make it easier and cheaper to repair than to grow away the “used” one and buy a new one is a step that is currently being taken by some furniture companies. Finally, the marketing system of the world should be shown with great adaptability and responsiveness. The same spirit needs to be applied to sustainable marketing and hopefully; much more progress and prosperity can be achieved in the times to come.
Brand Marketing through CRM By A. K. Mishra and Pallavi (Indian Journal of Marketing, Jan 2008)
They observe that over the years, brand marketing has evolved from a production oriented process to a customer centric approach. In fact, today marketing has slowly but steadily moved towards retaining the customers for longer period to ensure customer loyalty and greater profitability. Therefore, building long-term customer relationship with customers is the key to success for the company. CRM is the customer centric business culture, which help in effective marketing of the brand. I a fiercely competitive environment, CRM has emerged as the core marketing activity for companies. A large number of factors have contributed to maintain relationship with customers, such as increasing pressure of competition, intense brand struggle, frequent introduction of new products, shrinking life cycles of the products, highly informed and more demanding customers, decreasing customers loyalties, etc. Thus, CRM demands building trust as a binding force for value added relationships, which benefit both the company as well as the customers.
Success Factors of Place Marketing: A Study of Place Marketing Practices in Northern Europe and the United States By Dr. Seppo K. Rainisto ( Sep 2003)
The aim of the study is to evaluate which are the most critical success factors in place marketing, and how these factors could be utilized in place development. The study builds a framework and analyses place marketing practices from the perspectives of the process, assessment criteria and success factors. The main research focus is on marketing management aspects in place marketing.
The study makes a managerial contribution by giving recommendations for place marketing practices, and by offering a new and holistic framework to help places move to a more systematic and effective marketing approach.
Green Marketing: An Illusion or Reality By Sheenu Jian (Indian Journal of Marketing, May 2007)
According to him Green marketing has its own methodology, and within companies, legends abound about the difficulties posed by customers, colleagues, and corporate cultures when trying
to develop greener strategies. The practical implementation of green marketing has been often worked on the assumption that since greening was what customer wanted, marketer would follow their lead, and that the rest of the organization would be happy to support them. This would in the world of entirely marketing orientated firms, but neglected the internal environment.
How Dynamic Consumer Response, Dynamic Competitor Response and Expanded Company Action Shape Longterm Marketing Effectiveness By KOEN H. PAUWELS (May 2003)
The first finding of this study is that dynamic consumer response significantly differs from the net long-term impact and largely follows marketing theory predictions. Second, expanded company action is a main contributor to net long-term marketing effectiveness in both datasets. For tactical actions, such as price and feature changes, it takes the form of inertia (prolonged company action), as promotions continue for several weeks due to both manufacturer and retailer decisions. For strategic actions, such as advertising and product line extensions, cross-marketing support (integrated company action) adds strongly to dynamic consumer response. Finally, competitor response reduces the net long-term impact in one application, but not in the other. As a result, managers are urged to look beyond dynamic consumer and competitor response and to evaluate their company's and retailer's decision rules for expanded marketing actions when assessing long-term marketing effectiveness.
Strategic Marketing - Role of Relationships, Information & Services By Komal Chopra (Dec 12, 2004)
In this radically changing business environment, organizations need to develop new competencies almost every minute to be ahead of the competitors. Strategizing from marketing point of view is of crucial importance as this is the platform of direct interaction with the customer. Utmost care has to taken to give the best to the customer in order to expect the best. With a variety of good options available to the customers in almost every industry, it is only providing that “extra” to the customers that will help the firm sustain in the long run.
Customer Lifetime Value: stochastic optimization approach By W. K. Ching, K. K. Wong and E Altman (Journal of the operational Research Society, April 2004)
We are in the age of relational marketing, an age in which a sale starts a customer company relationship. Relationship marketing is a process of making and maintaining value laden relationship with customers. The core of the relationship marketing is the development and maintenance of a long term relationship with customers. In Principle, marketing is the art of attracting and keeping customers. A company should strive to identify the ‘Profitable’ customers and keep them with an ‘acceptable effort’.
In this paper they propose a stochastic dynamics programming model for the optimization of customer lifetime value (CLV). Both cases of infinite horizon and finite horizon with budget constraints are discussed. The former case can be solved by using linear programming techniques, and the latter problem can be solved by using dynamics programming approach. The models are then applied to practical data of a computer service company. The company makes use of the proposed CLV model to make and maintain value-laden relationship with customers. Holistic Customer Requirement and the Design-Select Decision By Karl T. Ulrich and David J. Ellison (Management Science, May 1999)
Given the economic benefits of selecting existing components, when should firms invest in designing product-specific components? They have argued theoretically and demonstrated empirically that the nature of customer requirements impacts the design-select decision. Specifically, holistic customer requirement and customer requirements involving mass and variable cost are all significant in explaining the degree to which firms design product-specific components. They also argued that the importance of small size will constrain a designer’s ability to select components, but find little empirical support for this hypothesis. In addition to the specific finding presented above, this paper has highlighted the design-select decision and introduced the concept of holistic customer requirements, those customer requirements that arise from many components of the product in complex ways.
Profit maximization in a multi-product firm with impatient customers By EJ Levin, Y Ma and RE Wright (Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2004)
The Standard model of a monopoly is extended to include multi-product production in which the product range is decided by management and the market is characterized by customers who are willing to pay higher prices for goods that can be supplied quickly. The formal model provides a means by which the solution to this complex problem can be calculated with very little data.
Further research is required to relax a number of our simplifying assumptions in order to increase the generality of the model without losing focus with respect to central issues. For example, the assumption that the firm is a monopoly might be replaced by interdependences between firms. A market may be in equilibrium with one firm setting a lower price than its competitors if it also offers a longer delivery date. Likewise, price elasticity of demand need not be zero for the products sold by the firm. The profit function may be sensitive to which products are added or removed from the range offered. More generally, further consideration of the functional relationships between the key decisions variables would provides a closer representations of the issues confronted by multi product firms.
Is Knowledge Power? Knowledge flows, subsidiary power and rent-seeking with MNC’s By Ram Mudambi and Pietro Navarra ( Journal of International Business studies, July 2004) In this paper, our objective is to study some of the implications of the dispersal of knowledge- creating activities within the MNC. In particular, we suggest that this trend has increased the extent and scope of subsidiary bargaining power within the firm. In turn, we suggest that such power may underlie findings of increased intra-organizational tension in knowledge creating activities. Further, fears of subsidiary rent seeking may lead many MNCs to forgo the benefits of subsidiary independence.
We believe that our study offers some significant novelties. First, we distinguish between discretion and bargaining power at the subsidiary level, where the latter is the extent to which the subsidiary is not subject to headquarters veto. We find strong evidence that such power is exercised by MNC subsidiaries. Second, we attempt to study not only knowledge flows per se, but also the pattern of knowledge flows. We find that this pattern, rather than the extent of flows, has the more significant effect on subsidiary bargaining power within the firm and consequently on the level of rent-seeking behavior.