Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Customer relationships 
Clearly, in many companies, channel development has included the establishment of direct 
channels, such as those based around Internet websites – in consumer marketing by 2014 
almost a third of British household purchases apart from groceries were made online ( Poulter, 
2014b ). Indeed, by 2014 Internet shopping was blamed for the closure of 16 high-street stores 
a day ( Poulter, 2014a ), and in 2019 The Guardian predicted that by 2029 more than half of all 
retail sales in the UK will be online (Butler, 2019). The proportion of spending going online is 
much higher for many business-to-business sellers. At the same time, there is a growing trend 
towards outsourcing routine sales operations to third parties ( Anderson and Trinkle, 2005 ). In 
the USA, Proctor & Gamble has a 200-person team wholly dedicated to Walmart (the single 
customer that constitutes 20 per cent of P&G’s business); it is relatively straightforward for 
P&G to outsource routine sales visits to stores to a third-party sales organisation. For exam-
ple, Acosta in the USA provides the third-party sales team for Kellogg’s, P&G and Nestlé in 
American supermarkets, and their clients include the number one and number two brands in 
most grocery categories ( Boyle, 2011 ). Similarly, global corporate expenditure on customer 
relationship management (CRM) technology is measured each year in billions of dollars, and 
individual spends by companies can be in tens of millions of dollars. CRM explicitly aims to 
automate many of the functions traditionally associated with the salesforce. 
However, this leaves the vital issue of whether a company’s most important business-to-
business customer relationships can really be managed to full advantage through a website, 
a third-party seller, or a call centre? Answering this question is important to understanding 
the strategic role of sales for a company, rather than considering only the routine activities 
involved in taking and processing orders, For instance, Dell Computers is an Internet-based 
company – the majority of sales and service provisions are on the Web. Nonetheless, Dell