Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Tangibles are the appearance of physical features: equipment, personnel, reports, com-
munications materials and so on. Chartered accountants, for example, are critically 
aware of the impression their physical appearance creates with their clients. Care and 
attention is exercised when choosing company cars for partners and managers. Too 
expensive or luxurious a car might signal to clients that they are paying too high a fee 
for the services they are getting, while too cheap a car might signal that the firm is not 
particularly successful. Tangibles can be used in this way as indicators of professional 
competence.
● 
Empathy is the provision of caring, individualised attention to customers. It is the quality 
that good doctors have of being able to convince patients that they really care about their 
welfare beyond addressing the current ailment. Empathy implies treating customers as 
individual clients and being concerned with their longer-term interests.

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CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
● 
Responsiveness is the ability of the organisation to react positively and in time to cus-
tomer requests and requirements. Some businesses (such as Richardson Sheffield Ltd, 
which makes kitchen knives under the Laser brand), have built their positions on being 
more responsive to the customer than their competitors. Richardson Sheffield claims to 
respond to written enquiries within the day, electronic enquiries within minutes and tel-
ephone enquiries instantly. They can also provide samples of products the next working 
day, even to new specifications. In some markets, instantaneous (or near-instantaneous) 
responsiveness is critical. In Japan, for example, a key factor for success in the eleva-
tor business is the speed with which faults are fixed. Responsiveness typically requires 
flexibility. Customer requests can often be offbeat, unexpected. The highly responsive 
organisation will need to predict where possible, but build into its systems and opera-
tions the capacity to respond to the unpredictable.
These five main dimensions of service quality have been found in many different 
service situations, from banking to restaurants, construction to professional services 
( Parasuraman et al ., 1988 ). The relative importance of each might vary, and the way 
in which each is manifested in any situation will be different, but time and again these 
factors have been shown to be relevant to customers in their evaluation of the services 
they receive.
13.6 
Customer relationship management 
The importance of enhanced customer relationships has led to large investments by many 
companies in formalised customer relationship management (CRM) systems – most com-
monly manifested in call centres, customer service/loyalty programmes and data warehous-
ing. In fact, CRM is better understood as a cross-functional core business process concerned 
with achieving improved shareholder value through the development of effective relation-
ships with key customers and customer segments ( Payne and Frow, 2005 ). 
For example, the French hotel group Accor links CRM data to its guest survey informa-
tion in its Sofitel and Novatel hotels, to anticipate the preferences of frequent users. The 
vice president for sales and marketing for Accor North America notes: 
It takes us back to the time when there were small inns and the owner knew every customer 
and treated them as an individual. It should help streamline check-in and accommodate 
preferences for guests who, for example, request the same room every time. The group 
will be able to market with a microscope instead of a telescope. 
 ( Edmunds, 2000 )
The goal of CRM systems is to form and sustain valuable customer relationships ( Kale, 
2004 ). CRM encourages a focus on customer loyalty and retention, with the goal of win-
ning a large share of the total lifetime value of each profitable customer. However, one of 
the primary conclusions of research concerning CRM performance is that achieving desired 
customer outcomes requires alignment with the entire organisation – avoiding the narrow 
and incomplete perspective of viewing CRM just as the technology of call centres and data 
warehousing. 
It is clear that successful CRM initiatives are guided by a carefully formulated and imple-
mented organisational strategy. CRM offers sellers the opportunity to gather customer 
information rapidly, identify the most valuable customers over the relevant time period 
and increase customer loyalty by providing customised products and services ( Cravens and 
Piercy, 2012 ). This has been described as ‘tying in an asset’, when the asset is the customer 

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