Marketer Responses and Adjustments

As the environment changes and companies adjust, marketers also are rethinking their philosophies, concepts, and tools. Here are the major marketing themes at the start of the new millennium:

-Relationship marketing: From focusing on transactions to building long-term, portable customer relationships. Companies focus on their most portable customers, products, and channels.

-Customer lifetime value: From making a port on each sale to making ports by managing customer lifetime value. Some companies offer to deliver a constantly needed product on a regular basis at a lower price per unit because they will enjoy the customer’s business for a longer period.

-Customer share: From a focus on gaining market share to a focus on building customer share. Companies build customer share by offering a larger variety of goods to their existing customers and by training employees in cross-selling and up-selling.

-Target marketing: From selling to everyone to trying to be the best .ram serving welled .need target markets. Target marketing is being facilitated by the proliferation of special-interest magazines, TV channels, and Internet newsgroups.

-Individualization: From selling the same offer in the same way to everyone in the target market to individualizing and customizing messages and offerings.

-Customer database: From collecting sales data to building a data warehouse of Information about individual customers’ purchases, preferences, demographics, and portability. Companies can “data-mine” their proprietary databases to detect different customer need clusters and make differentiated offerings to each cluster.

-Integrated marketing communications: From reliance on one communication tool such as advertising to blending several tools to deliver a consistent brand image to customers at every brand contact.

-Channels as partners: From thinking of intermediaries as customers to treating them
as partners in delivering value to .anal customers.

-Every employee a marketer: From thinking that marketing is done only by marketing, sales, and customer support personnel to recognizing that every employee must be customer-focused.

-Model-based decision making: From making decisions on intuition or slim data to
Basing decisions on models and facts on how the marketplace works.

Marketer Responses and Adjustments