Approaches Taken By Organizations In The B2C Sector In Building And Maintaining Relationships With Consumers

Minimizing conflict

Critically discuss the approaches taken by organizations in the B2C sector in building and maintaining relationships with consumers; and the consumer's role in this process?

Relationship Marketing and Customer relationship management have taken an important position in the marketing strategy over the past few years. There was a huge confluence in terms of a transition to service based economies which advance in communication, logistics, computing and other technological advancements, an increased amount of global competition with a faster and an increased level of product customization. All these terms have built a perfect path for the Business leaders to make ways to a progressive path in terms of building relationships with their Customers. This has also been dependent on a mix of various marketing factors.

Meanwhile there have been various trends which have been increasing the customer’s desires for the most special attributes in a customer relationship building environment like reduced risks in terms of products and services, increased levels of service, innovative models of service and sales strategies and higher rates of enhanced cooperation with a greater flexibility. All these situations have created a greater standard for the business leaders and the customers to conduct the business in a more interesting way in conducting their business transactions with embedded relationships.

In this article we would discuss the approaches taken by organizations in the B2C sector in building and maintaining relationships with consumers; and the consumer's role in this process.

The factors which affect the customer relationship environments are conflicts. Most of the researches have proved that any conflicts between the Management and the customers generally result in creating greater conflicts and confusion which result in destroying the trust, commitment and it ends up in spoiling the relationship which was built with a greater amount of effort over the period of many years. The Organizations must emphasize the importance in resolving conflict which is a prerequisite for resolving most of the conflicts in a lot of customer environments.

Relationship Management is a part of social and structural environments and it is not an essential part of the financial programs because the social programs tend to give out more returns. The relationship management aims to make the communication aspect as an essential part of the customer management with an increased amount of time, frequency, quality of interactions and service levels which are maintained with the customers. Communication alone is a major driver in terms of increasing the customer relationship which in turn establishes a greater bond with them for a future relationship and relations.

Relationship management

Structural program environment also tends to increase the levels of customer interaction in terms of order interfacing, customized product packaging, sales, delivery and servicing. These strategies also help the Business Organizations and the customers in enhancing their relationships by setting higher targets of sales with higher volumes more than the existing ones, growing customers, larger sales volumes support and support implementation costs which provide more volume to the customers with a higher frequency of interaction levels.

In order to leverage the marketing relationship programs and investments by the companies the organization should target their time to ensure they attain a marketing benefit in such a way that the customer’s needs are at its peak. The values should be timed in such a way that benefits are timed to a greater extent.  Understanding and managing gratitude and its role in building and maintaining reciprocity play a major role in effective relationship marketing. Grateful customers always come back with a lot of gratitude and the organizations should give them an opportunity to reciprocate after they receive an RM benefit.

 There are a lot of researches which have been conducted and there are 3 main aspects which have been suggested in terms of relationship marketing like

• Engagement activities across various stages of relationship lifecycle ( Gronroos 1997; Sheth Parvatiyar 2000)
   
• The no. of stages and terminology are different in nature sometimes where even multiple stages are involved in it (Dwyer and Oh 1987; Wilson1995).
   
• The other critical aspect is the target or the scope of the relationship in the marketing activities where most of the activities are restricted to customer relationships and other relationships in the internal departments (Morgan and Hunt 1994)

All these aspects open up a scope of relationship marketing practice to any target entity which seems appropriate. There are many recent researches which have been conducted in terms of managing customer relationships with parties other than customers in most of the cases (Rindfleisch and Moorman 2003; Sivadas and Dwyer 2000).

All the products and services have to be marketed for some advantages can be communicated to the audience. The promotional mix can consist of factors like

Advertising, public relations, sales promotion, personal selling, internet marketing and sponsorship where an effective communication can be done to all audience by adapting various sources like branding, slogans, designs and product or service qualities. They can use their resources to communicate with the other organizations. Various stages of a promotional strategy can also be implemented like growth and decline. This happens in various stages as the process of product life cycle implements different promotional strategies.

Marketing mix of a product and service consists of product, price, place and promotion it also consists of additional factors like people, process and physical evidence.

People

People are an important factor in service organizations as they help in various services like provision, recruiting, training and evaluating various factors in the organization. When consumers would like to interact they would interact with people who represent the organization.

Time to implement programs

Process

This factor evaluates the systems which are used to deliver service. A service which is prompt ensures a greater customer satisfaction and a focused approach by the consumers

Physical environment is critical to know where the service is delivered as most of the customers will make decisions based on the physical location of the organization.

All these attributes are critical for any type of service which would provide a greater service to people with greater levels of responsibility and inseparability.

Pricing is the most critical aspect of a marketing mix which can produce greater turnover of the organization. There are variable costs to produce a product and there is a cost involved to promote them. Pricing should support all these elements of a marketing mix.

The pricing strategies are based on the objectives an organization has like penetration pricing, skimming pricing, competition pricing, product line pricing, psychological pricing and other factors.

The pricing strategies have their own ways of marketing like pricing on a low price and increasing the prices later, setting a higher price and then reducing the prices, setting prices by comparing with the competitors, prices which are different for various products and the psychology of prices.

The pricing strategy which is most suitable for any type of an organization which could be based pricing. Optional pricing can also be a strategy for setting prices for various services which are provided by the charity they can sell optional services to maximize the turn over which the organization can produce.

A business which increases its market orientation will be able to enhance its market performance. Researches have been conducted to prove this fact.

Market orientation is one element which consists of 3 behavioural components and 2 decision components which are related with a long term focus on profit objectives. For any business to maximise its profits it should work on improving the quality of the products and should be able to create a superior value to its customers.  It happens in all the organizations which make products which are needed by people in their daily lives. These products can be called as consumer products. To create a continuous improvement in the quality of these products they the strategy should be market oriented and consumer oriented (Anderson, P, 1982).

These products can be divided into consumer products, commodity business, non commodity business and sales. A reliability analysis can be conducted by taking various products from all these groups and can be tested on reliability and validity. The factors of reliability are for customer orientation and competitor orientation which enhance the relations to increase their sales. The long term objectives and the profit objective measures might be different because the products might not be meeting the demands of the customers. Economies of sales which are generated by production a large mass of production will reduce the costs of production and contributes to creating large profits to the organization.

Integrating promotional activity to achieve marketing objectives: B2C scenarios

A market oriented company conducts market research and product research as markets change.

A product oriented organization focuses on the quality of the products as they feel that if the products are of a high quality the customers will like them. The disadvantage with this strategy is the high quality might not satisfy the customers all the time as it might not be the type of a product they wanted.

Production has its focus on various aspects of operations like managing production, costs involves in production, economies of sales and profits for the organization. The production process focuses on reducing the costs involved in production of various products. If the organizations compromise on the design and quality of products to increase production the product might lose its charm in the market.

An organization whose main focus is sales will try to sell in the market. These organizations depend on sales and marketing where they involve in building their marketing strategies of what the customer needs and they develop their products without conducting a research on them. These organizations might have disadvantages where sales are a combined effort of products, production and market.

There are 2 types of distribution which are available like indirect distribution which involves distributing products by using some service or a direct distribution where the products are distributed directly to the consumer. They can  use strategies like

Intensive distribution

This distribution is used for products with low prices

Exclusive distribution

This distribution involves limited distribution to selected outlets. This involves greater costs

Selected Distribution

Various small shops are selected to distribute their products. It is common with technological devices and consumer products. In this distribution the consumers would like to choose depending on various options they might have.

The excusive strategy can be selected for all types of business organizations where a system is in place to solve any issues with the audience or consumers.

There are various factors on which consumer behaviour would depend on in various situations. This depends on the types of products where some of them would be decided by the internal factors or external factors and some of them would depend on the way people think about those situations and this is the most suitable approach for our charity.

Various programs of business entitlement would need high end strategies to motivate the consumers to decide based on their views of life than the other people. This happens in various stages of a process like

Additional elements of the extended marketing mix and how they relate to the charity

The different types of buying behaviour would depend on

The recognition of value

The decisions which the consumers take whether they need to buy that service or whether they would want to be a part of the service.

The verification which the consumers would want to do in order to select a service would depend on the experiences they share with their from various sources about the same product. Sources might include people they know, other organizations which do a similar service, reviews and researches which were conducted. These consumers might consider these marketing strategies when they want to buy that product or service (Aaker, D, 1986).

All the qualities of a product are compared to other products including their value by the consumers when they would want to buy any products where the quality of the products is the most important attribute for a consumer to consider the product or the service.

When all the research options are completed the consumer makes a decision whether to buy the product or service.

In case of any business the same options would be considered because the customers would decide on the services they would choose depending on the quality of services the organization can offer.

All the organizations start their business operations to serve one segment of consumers in the market. With the experience of marketing and sales they have gained they would start new segments in the same organization which can reach out to new consumers with different demands however it is not possible for all the organizations to meet the needs of all the customers.

This has given rise to a new concept called as segmentation in which a market is divided into various segments to see the various behaviours and attitudes of various consumers regarding their buying methods and this method helps in creating market segmentation.

Market segmentation is based on factors like the age, income and life cycle of the consumers which helps to conduct a study of the population. The study is conducted by dividing the population into various factors because as people grow in their age there are changes in their needs which needs the organizations to develop some products which are made for some age groups. Most of the consumer products related to food and health are under this group. The type of customers we would focus on would be based on the income group, location and the life style as it is critical to consider all these factors to choose a customer group for a charity organization (Pearce, J, 1987).

How prices are set to reflect an organization’s objectives and market conditions including image and quality

Organizations also aim at creating products which are for a separate income group by aiming at high end buyers than normal buyers. There are advantages with this segmentation as they can price their products at higher prices and provide good quality where the customers would not ask for any discounts however in the normal end products the buyers would expect reduced prices.

The markets are divided into various segments depending on the locations. Location segmentation is also similar to the income segmentation where people of some places would have some behavioural attributes as they might be from a high end community. This is also a factor for some of the products to be sold in some places than other places. This can also be implemented in the international organizations where the international locations can be divided into different regions. For instance various food and hospitality groups have started their operations in all the parts of the world however their products are made for some groups of people based on the factors which we have discussed earlier. The products are also made depending on the taste the people in that location.

This type of segmentation helps the organizations to develop new and most suitable segments of the products and services they provide and this segmentation can be divided into further types like life style which the people follow, social class and other personal attributes.

Marketing can be done with the right sources and by developing effective messages by selecting their own channels and media.  The organizations can choose the media and the communication processes to give any show of the products. Sources like websites might also be great if they are used in an effective way. Websites can be developed with the proper information which is related to the new products and the websites can be revised on a timely basis. The TV shows might have a lot of effect on the consumers with a repetition a no. of times and with catchy lines (People’s Daily Online, 2008).

Cognitive messages are a cognitive communication strategy which introduces new products and it also has product differentiators. The new product innovation model suggests a cognitive model which a consumer follows which leads to the buying of new products. This process has 5 stages like Knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation.

 In the knowledge stage the consumers will learn about the products and will also understand their advantages. This is the aspect which covers all the advantages which the brand would like to show where this helps the brand value to be enhanced.

The 2^nd stage is the implementation stage where the organization selects new companies or media to promote their brands or products. This is done by conducting various promotional events in various organizations which they can promote in other websites like social sites. This is the right place to get a lot of customers where they see the products and they can decide to buy the products. Most of the organizations which sell products organize online sales which attract a lot of customers to buy their products. News letters can be organized to sell their products. Celebrities who are a great attraction to most of the people are mostly the brand ambassadors for such branded products as the consumers would like the celebrities for a fact and they would like to watch them on the commercial on different shows.

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