Achieving Excellence In Services Marketing

The increased importance of the service industry has sharpened the focus on what it takes to excel in the market­ing of services.40 Here are some guidelines. 1. MARKETING EXCELLENCE Marketing excellence in services requires excellence in three broad areas: external, internal, and interactive marketing (see Figure 14.3).41 [1] External marketing describes the normal work

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Managing Service Quality

The service quality of a firm is tested at each service encounter. If employees are bored, cannot answer simple questions, or are visiting each other while customers are waiting, customers will think twice about doing busi­ness there again. Wells Fargo has succeeded in the banking industry by focusing on its customers and delivering superior

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Managing Product-Support Services

No less important than service industries are product-based industries that must provide a service bundle.95 Manufacturers of equipment—small appliances, office machines, tractors, mainframes, airplanes—all must provide product-support services, now a battleground for competitive advantage. Many product companies also have a stronger online presence than before and must ensure they offer adequate—if not superior—service online

MARKETING EXCELLENCE CLUB MED

Club Mediterranee or Club Med is a French company founded in 1950 by Gerard Blitz and Gilbert Trigano with the objective of offering holidays to customers with an innovative “all-inclusive” formula. The idea of happi­ness was at the heart of the concept. Today, Club Med has 72 resorts in more than 30 countries, including

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MARKETING EXCELLENCE PARKWAY GROUP HOTEL

Parkway Group Healthcare, headquartered in Singapore, was founded by Dr. Lim Cheok Peng and others in 1987 and has grown internationally by an­nexing other hospitals. For example, Parkway’s joint venture with Apollo Hospitals in India has facilitated its expansion into that market. Parkway’s hospitals provide exceptional patient care and offer specialty clinics in areas,

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New-Product Options

There are a variety of types of new products and ways to create them.2 1. MAKE OR BUY A company can add new products through acquisition or development. When acquiring, the company can buy other companies, buy patents from other companies, or buy a license or franchise from another company. Swiss food giant Nestle

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Challenges in New-Product Development

In retailing, consumer goods, electronics, autos, and other industries, the time to bring a product to market has been cut in half.20 For instance, luxury leather-goods maker Louis Vuitton has implemented a new factory format dubbed Pegase so it could ship fresh collections to its boutiques every six weeks—more than twice as frequently as

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Organizational Arrangements

Many companies use customer-driven engineering to develop new products, incorporating customer preferences in the final design. Some, such as SAP, have relied on organizational changes to help develop more successful new products.33 SAP After a series of high-profile acquisitions of firms such as SuccessFactors, Sybase, and Ariba, business software leader SAP set out to

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Managing the Development Process: Ideas

1. GENERATING IDEAS The new-product development process starts with the search for ideas. Some marketing experts believe we find the greatest opportunities and highest leverage for new products by uncovering the best possible set of unmet customer needs or technological innovation.53 New-product ideas can in fact come from interacting with various groups and using

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Managing the Development Process: Concept to Strategy

Attractive ideas must be refined into testable product concepts. A product idea is a possible product the company might offer to the market. A product concept is an elaborated version of the idea expressed in consumer terms. 1. CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING Concept development is a necessary but not sufficient step for new-product success.

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Managing the Development Process: Development to Commercialization

Up to now, the product has existed only as a word description, a drawing, or a prototype. The next step represents a jump in investment that dwarfs the costs incurred so far. The company will determine whether the product idea can translate into a technically and commercially feasible product. If not, the accumulated project

The Consumer-Adoption Process

Adoption is an individual’s decision to become a regular user of a product and is followed by the consumer- loyalty process. New-product marketers typically aim at early adopters and use the theory of innovation diffusion and consumer adoption to identify them. 1. STAGES IN THE ADOPTION PROCESS An innovation is any good, service, or

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MARKETING EXCELLENCE APPLE

Apple has transformed the way people listen to music, play video games, talk on the phone, and even read books. The company’s revolutionary product innova­tions include the iPod, the iMac, the iPhone, and the iPad. They are the reason the company topped Fortune’s Most Admired Companies list every year from 2008 to 2014. The

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MARKETING EXCELLENCE Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com was founded by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff in 1999. Benioff believed software should be free of troublesome installations, maintenance issues, and continuous upgrades. His vision was “to make soft­ware easier to purchase, simpler to use, and more demo­cratic.” With that in mind, Benioff led a start-up company called Salesforce.com that offered software-as-a-service

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Understanding Pricing

Price is not just a number on a tag. It comes in many forms and performs many functions. Rent, tuition, fares, fees, rates, tolls, retainers, wages, and commissions are all the price you pay for some good or service. Price also has many components. If you buy a new car, the sticker price may

Setting the Pricing Strategies and Programs

A firm must set a price for the first time when it develops a new product, when it introduces its regular product into a new distribution channel or geographical area, and when it enters bids on new contract work. The firm must decide where to position its product on quality and price. Most markets

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Adapting the Price

Companies usually do not set a single price but rather develop a pricing structure that reflects variations in geographi­cal demand and costs, market-segment requirements, purchase timing, order levels, delivery frequency, guarantees, service contracts, and other factors. As a result of discounts, allowances, and promotional support, a company rarely realizes the same profit from each

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Initiating and Responding to Price Changes

Companies often need to cut or raise prices. 1. INITIATING PRICE CUTS Several circumstances might lead a firm to cut prices. One is excess plant capacity: The firm needs additional busi­ness and cannot generate it through increased sales effort, product improvement, or other measures. Companies sometimes initiate price cuts in a drive to dominate

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MARKETING EXCELLENCE EBAY

In 1995, Pierre Omidayar, a French-Iranian immigrant, wrote the code for an auction Web site where everyone would have equal access to a single global market­place. Omidayar couldn’t believe it when a collec­tor bought the first item, a broken laser pointer, for $14.83.* Soon the site grew into a broader auction site where consumers

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MARKETING EXCELLENCE AIR ARABIA

Air Arabia took-off in 2003 with only two leased Airbus A320 jets. The Sharjah-based airline began as a start­up owned by the government and was the UAE’s third airline. Air Arabia has managed to establish its position in the regional market of low cost carriers (LCC). Recently, Air Arabia’s low-cost rivals, flydubai and flynas,

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