Tips - Assignment II - Engaging with External Environment

Dear all, I am writing my second assignment for E.E.E. I know, I know, I should been enjoying Easter break, but I prefer to enjoy my summer much better, then working hard now to have time for dissertation later on, finishing till the end of July...

I am writing to exchange some ideas with you about this assingment. Firstly, let's understand the question set:

• To what extent is the organisation currently using relationship marketing ?

In this section, we need to identify the level of relationship the company has with current customers. This seems to be the easiest part of the assessment, but this will determine the success of the assingment. You can figure out this point asking some questions for your chosen company:

- How often do you visit your customers ? Do you keep records about customer's complaints and suggestions ? Do you keep records of solutions adopted for customers ? Do these solutions used as a base for benchmarking ? Do are these information spread out to all members of the company ? Do you have a life time value customer study ? How do you select customers to maintain a close relationship ?

- Here would be great to demonstrate your literature knowledge about the topic. How can you identify a relationship strategy, without to know well what's it ?

• What at the current strengths and weaknesses of its current approach?

- Here, if your chosen company has a selling Culture (transactional culture) it is easier to find weakeness than strengths. I think to be allright to find just negative points and to point out which are the opportunities they are missing not adopting a Relationship approach.

· Where, on the ladder, should they be aiming to move their customers?

Once again, it is important to understand the Relationship ladder and the characteristics of each rung: suspect, prospect, customer, client, team member, advocate and partner. You should pay attention to the characteristics, otherwise you can fall on a mistake.

I've spoken with Caroline about this theory. She didn't remember the source, and I couldn't find the source, as well. If, one of you find, please let me know. I think to be an adaptation of several concepts...I've already seen this in some negotiation books.

· What approaches should they be using?

This section is about the marketing tools they should be using, if they are not using yet. The approach depends of the rung customers are setted. For instance, if customers' rung are Client, what to do for moving to Advocates ? First, the company should identify profitable customers to invest in a relationship, then to study customer's needs and characteristics, then apply some techniques such as: promotions, events, etc.

· What recommendations do you wish to make for this organisation?

In this section, we should recommend some actions or techniques to create loyalty, to invest in relationships after present the benefits in previous sections. Sometimes, the company just need to adjust their communication with customers: For instance, to establish frequent communication with customers highlighting benefits delivered during the relationship.

Please, if you have different viewpoints on this, send me an email and I will post on here ! Thanks !

Bibliography

Books

CHERNATONY, L & M MACDONALD. (2003) Creating Powerful brands, 3rd ed. Great Britain: Elsevier

DONALDSON, B. (1998) ‘Sales Management: Theory and Practice.’2nd Ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

DOYLE, P. (2002) Marketing Management and Strategy, 4th ed. Great Britain: FT Prentice Hall

EGAN, J. (2004) ‘Relationship Marketing: Exploring Relational Strategies in Marketing’. 2nd Ed. New York: Prentice Hall.

LITTLE, E. and MARANDI, E. (2003) “Relationship Marketing Management” London: Thomson Learning.

MITCHEL, R. and GOFFIN, K. (2005) “Innovation Management: Strategy and implementation using the Pentathlon Framework”. England: Pelgrave.


Journals

Guenzy, P. and Pardo, C. and Georges, L. (2007) ‘Relational Selling Strategy and key account managers’ relational behaviours: An Exploratory Study’. Industrial Marketing Management. Vol.36. p.p. 121-133.

Gronroos, C. (1997) ‘From Marketing mix to relationship marketing – towards a paradigm shift in marketing’, Management Decisions, 35(4) p.p. 322-339.

Berry, L.L and Shostack, G.L and Opah, G (1983) ‘Emerging Perspectives on Services Marketing’. Chicago, I1: American Marketing Association, p.p. 25-28.

Reichheld, F.F. and Junior, W.E.S.(1990) ‘Zero defections: Quality comes to Services.’ Harvard Business Review. Sept-Oct. pp. 105-111.

Narayandas, D. (2005) ‘Building Loyalty in Business Markets’. Harvard Business Review. September, p.p. 131-139.

Morgan, R., & Hunt, S. D. (1994). ‘The commitment-trust theory of relationship marketing’. Journal of Marketing, July Vol. 58, p.p. 20−38.

Payne, A. (1994) ‘Relationship Marketing: Make the Customer count’. Managing Service Quality. Vol.4,6. p.p. 29-31.

What makes a top-class corporate web presence ?

According to Bowen,D.(2007) from Financial Times, a good corporate Website allow you to move around easily without losing your bearings. This means a sign both of good construction and good governance.

Second, the best sites do all the jobs they could be doing offering a high-quality service to all stakeholders, since for jobseekers to investors and they offer a good point of contact.

Third, they make good use of web technology. With broadband spreading even in developing countries, video, podcasts and other features make sense, although imaginative use of less bandwidth-hungry tools can be at least as valuable.

The use of Web 2.0 and interactive functions to build communities online are not identified yet in almost the best Websites.

Companies are using a Website to protect and sometimes to rebuild their reputations. As people are interconnected and plugged on the Internet almost everyday in developed countries, companies are facing a challenge to cope with this new reality. A good Website, more than has a good design and to use the technology, as suggested in the recent study, conducte by Financial Times, it is compulsory to allow users to interact with the company, sometimes in real time.

If you are a marketing manager or student, you must consider that Webuser are even more impatitent and timeless. Therefore, we need to think well when developing a Website and interactions with our target market.

Web 2.0

I have been reading some stuff related to blogs, podcasts, twitter, web 2.0 generation and web interactions. This week, The Financial Times reported the top 20 corporate web sites elected according the criterias below:

Construction, Message, Contact, Serving Society, Serving Investors, Serving the media, Serving jobseekers and Serving Customers.

It seems to be simple and easy to have a Global Website, in order to attend all the stakeholders interested in the company. Although, it is not a easy task. More than high level of investments, it is necessary to understand the User's behaviour, and each one of this Stakeholders has a different needs and they are seeking or looking for different kind of interaction with the company.

I have no doubts to affirm that Marketer's tasks are difficult nowadays. We must know much more than marketing theories, marketing tools, macroenvironment relationships, relationship marketing or antropology and customer behaviour. In the modern world, we need to understand the level of interactions people want with the medias. For instance, Newspaper companies, such as Guardian and The Independent have been investing millions of pounds in Webpages in one attempt to interact and delivery to web users contents in different formats: news, comments and analysis delivered as text (SMS), interactive blogs, audio podcasts, video and automated gadgetry.

While here in Europe, companies like these are trying to follow the new wave created by the technology, in Brazil users still have to subscripe online content to have access to complete news and quality information. Then, I ask myself: When companies, such as Folha de Sao Paulo and Estado de Sao Paulo will start the process to interact with Web users ? Maybe, when the Web advertising revenues surpassed the newspaper advertising revenues, such is happening in UK right now.

The fact is, WEB USERS are gainining control over the media through using the available technology to be interconnected between each other, creating communities, exchanging ideas and opinions. The challenges for companies are huge because the technology has broken security barriers and issues like spam, worms, Trojans, viruses, phishing and pharming and denial for service are taken into account, the responsibility and organisation - or rather, its management - bears for the safety and integrity of its information is both obvious and onerous. The question is: What to do, in order to be protected and avoid all of these threats ?

In an attempt to overcome these challenges, we have now ISO 27001 the number one internationally recognised standard for information security. For whom of you that already experienced an ISO process in a company, you know the problems and the hard work necessary to implement such processes and KPIs inside a company. Can you imagine this certification ? A company electing to go for ISO 27001 will probably take 12 months or two years to put all the proper procedures in place at which point... well, if everything gone be alright, of course !

By the way, the top 20 sites mentioned before are:

Siemens, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Nokia, AstraZeneca, Total, IBM, ING, UBS, General Electric, Vodafone, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, ENI, Nestle, Roche, Wal-Mart, Chevron, Cisco System and GlaxoSmithKline.

According to Financial Times, 28 March 2007, Compania Vale do Rio Doce, the Brazilian mining giant, has an expensive site that just does not work well, at all.